Marketing

US restaurant transaction decline easing up a bit

June 15, 2020

U.S. restaurant chain customer transactions were down -14% for the week ending June 7, revealing improvement for an industry hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Full service chains are seeing the most gains as more dining rooms and overall business is opening across the country. The latest figures, from The NPD Group, reflect a +29% gain compared to the worst decline of -43% which took place the week ending April 12, according to a press release.

At this point, 69% of restaurant units are in areas that are allowing some aspect of on-premise dining and that figure likely will jump into the lower 70's as of this week.

Yet, despite the positive figures the full service restaurant segment is still down, 30%, compared to a year ago, according to CREST Performance Alerts, which provides weekly views of chain-specific transactions, according to the release.

In the QSR environment chains are doing better than FSRs as they were able to pivot to off-premise service quicker given drive-thru windows already up and running. QSR customer transactions were down -13% in the week ending June 7 compared to a year ago.

"The value of incremental on-premise sales isn't as important to quick service restaurants," David Portalatin, NPD food industry advisor and author of Eating Patterns in America, said in the release. "In fact, some have resisted reopening dining rooms preferring to forego the incremental cost of doing so and continue to optimize off-premise sales."