Data Dive: Mother’s Day Bump Helps Ongoing Restaurant Recovery

In a trend happening nationwide, we continue to see a recovery among our restaurant clients. Looking at the week-on-week data we can see that the run of positive weekly results has continued, with each day an average of ~5% to 10% higher than the week before. Mother’s Day, however, showed two interesting trends. First, it was a massive uptick from the previous Sunday, but check sizes were also higher than visits, indicating that people visited more expensive restaurants, or at least were ordering food for more people at once.

There is always a bump for Mother’s Day, but the difference this year from the previous trend shows tremendous pent-up demand from the market. Clearly people wanted to spoil mom.

Still, when we look at the fixed-period chart that compares sales to a pre-COVID baseline, we can see that visits and spend are still down, but up from the bottom. We’re a long way from a full recovery, but the trendlines are headed in the right direction.

The recovery isn’t even across the board, however. Both our data and that seen by QSR Magazine indicate that quick service restaurants are doing the best, especially those with drive-thru options, with fine dining being the hardest hit segment.

This past week saw things slow down for convenience stores compared with the week before, but overall they haven’t been hit as hard as restaurants. The biggest challenge there is in gallons of gas, but that appears to be leveling off. There is some speculation that we could see an increase in car trips this summer, which would pay off for this market segment.

Overall, however, In-Store spend is now only 5-10% below pre-COVID levels and gas purchases are roughly ~25% below pre-COVID levels.

Paytronix aggregates sales and visit data across more than 400 brands to identify trends and leading indicators. Visit our site for more information on the impact of COVID-19 and market data.