It is hard to exaggerate the significance COVID-19 had on the economy in general. The impact on the restaurant industry specifically has been even harsher, and – worse still – harder to shake off.

While industries like travel and tourism have since fully recovered– restaurants have not.

We broke down the financial data at Black Box Intelligence. With the exception of 2021 (which had the benefit of lapping the shutdown), neither Limited Service nor Full Service have recorded positive year-over-year traffic growth since 2019.

Some Dayparts Decline More Than Others

And the bad news isn’t done.

On an industry level, all dayparts have seen a decline in traffic compared to 2019.

However, not all dayparts have suffered equally.

In fact, the one area of positive growth was in limited service restaurants. And this was during late night hours. Compared to the same units in 2019, they have recorded 8.3% more traffic.

Limited Service Outperforms Throughout Most of the Day

The positive late night growth for limited service seems to have come at the expense of full service restaurants.

This came at an enormous 26.2% drop in their same-store traffic growth compared to pre-pandemic numbers.

That’s both on and off-premise dining seeing negative impact.

This trade-down from full service to limited service compared to 5 years ago was the general pattern among all dayparts.

Limited service restaurants outperformed those in full service by 12.5 percentage points in dinner traffic growth and 12.1 percentage points in breakfast growth.

Food at Home and Trade Downs

Despite all of that, traffic is still down overall.

We suspect that this behavior is likely a symptom of inflation.

Since 2019, the value of the US dollar has decreased by 23%.

Understandably, consumers are choosing to stay home for more meals and trading down on the occasions they do go out.

Only lunch saw limited service and full service at the same level of negative growth.

Why?

Perhaps the rise of remote work, also a consequence of COVID, plays a factor in the weakness at this time of day.

Thinking Beyond COVID

As convenient as it would be to lay the entirety of the blame on COVID, it wouldn’t be accurate.

According to Black Box Intelligence’s dataset the decline began earlier.

Full service and limited service saw a decline each year in YoY traffic growth not since 2019 but instead 2016 (again, with the exception of 2021).

Work from home and online shopping, two primary culprits for the traffic falloff, were gradually on the rise well before the pandemic.

In many ways, COVID-19 can be seen less as the cause and more as an accelerant towards an inevitable shift in consumer behavior.

Restaurateurs that have been waiting for a return to normalcy, may need to accept that behavior has likely changed permanently. Identifying and adjusting to the areas and times showing the most opportunity in this “new normal”  environment is a better strategy than waiting for a return to a bygone era.