Thanksgiving Meal Calculator gives consumers key data for holiday dinner decisions
New insights shed light on downtown recovery and restaurant worker wages
Oakland, CA – NOV. 14, 2023 – Today, Square released the latest edition of its quarterly Restaurant
Industry Report, which uses data across Square’s food and beverage sellers to examine dining trends and shifts in
both consumer spending and restaurant wages.
This Thanksgiving, consider ordering out
As restaurants continue expanding their offerings to include meal kits, branded merchandise, and more,
some eateries are now offering prix fixe Thanksgiving meals to bring consumers the luxury of choice and convenience.
Hosting and cooking Thanksgiving can be quite the feat. As consumers begin planning for their Thanksgiving
dinners, Square has created a Thanksgiving Meal calculator that enables consumers to estimate the cost of a take-out
Thanksgiving meal from local restaurants. Nationwide, a hearty meal would cost $34 per person on
average.
Dining out plateaus post-pandemic in America’s downtowns, but some cities thrive
As many consumers continue working from home at least part time, demand at restaurants in downtown areas
is stabilizing. Square analyzed the hourly share of card-present transactions at food and drink establishments in
the United States from 2019 through September 2023. Compared to January 2019, downtown neighborhoods in American
cities appear to have flatlined at roughly 72% of their pre-pandemic activity as of the end of
September 2023.
While dining and going out has not fully returned to pre-pandemic levels across all cities, a few
downtowns nationwide are thriving. When looking at the top 15 metropolitan areas in the country,
Detroit has seen major growth in food and beverage transactions with a 75%
increase since 2019, followed by Los Angeles and Miami (increasing 18% and 17%,
respectively). Other cities that are at or nearly back to 2019 levels of dining activity include
Boston (up 2%) and Phoenix (down 8%).
“While dining trends are normalizing, restaurants in cities that are experiencing spikes or slumps can
take advantage of technology to help handle increased orders or drive more traffic,” said Ming-Tai Huh, General
Manager of Square for Restaurants. “For restaurants that fill up at lunchtime or right after work, consider using
handhelds for line-busting or an easy-to-use KDS to get orders out faster, and for those that are seeing a
slow-down, lean into automated marketing tools to attract the crowds.”
To continue bringing in guests and create repeat customers, restaurants can harness marketing and loyalty
tools. With Square Marketing, restaurants
can easily promote new menu items, events, or deals, and they can also take advantage of automated campaigns to
welcome new customers, bring back lapsed customers, send birthday promotions, and more. With Square Loyalty, restaurants can
drive repeat guests through fully integrated and easy-to-enroll loyalty programs that provide operators with
real-time visibility into customer activity and sales impact.
Restaurant wages are up, but their growth is slowing
Last month, Square introduced the Square Payroll
Index, a new economic indicator that measures compensation of service workers in the food and
drink and retail sectors in the United States using data from Square Payroll. With this tool, you can see how base wages and total earnings
(including tips and overtime) have changed since 2017, and business owners can better understand if the wages they
offer are competitive in their market.
Amid the pandemic, restaurants faced major labor shortages – and in turn, had to quickly raise their base
wages to attract the workers they needed to keep their businesses running. Wage growth for restaurant workers peaked
in March 2022 at 8.52% when workers were making, on average, $12.80 per hour in base wages and
$16.42 per hour in overall earnings.
A year and a half later, though, wage growth has slowed – while front- and back-of-house staff are making
an average of $13.80 per hour in base wages and $17.67 per hour overall, wages are now growing at
4.59% and overall earnings at 5.02%.
Despite wage growth slowing for restaurant workers nationwide, some metropolitan areas are seeing
above-average earnings growth – Cincinnati, Las Vegas, and
Jacksonville saw year-over-year growth of 8.53%, 7.66%, and 6.46%, respectively, as of October
2023.
Restaurants lean into subscriptions for recurring revenue
Over the past few years, restaurateurs have faced challenges from inflation to economic uncertainty, and
they are now finding increasingly innovative ways to adapt and strengthen their businesses through additional
revenue streams. One way food and beverage sellers have diversified their offerings is through subscriptions for
memberships, such as a monthly wine club or a quarterly shipment of fresh jams and sauces.
As of August 1, 2023, Square observed 54% growth YoY in food and drink sellers with
active buyer subscriptions. What’s more, 57% of the subscriptions that consumers purchased from
food and drink sellers were still active after 6 months, according to a cohort analysis of Square sellers using
Subscriptions.
Using technology like Square
Subscriptions, sellers are able to engage and bring back customers while also automating
recurring payments. With a clear consumer appetite for these sorts of offerings, food and beverage businesses are
able to eas ily take advantage of this reliable revenue stream.
About Square
Square makes commerce and financial services easy and accessible with its integrated ecosystem of commerce
solutions. Square offers purpose-built software to run complex restaurant, retail, and professional services
operations, versatile e-commerce tools, embedded financial services and banking products, buy now, pay later
functionality through Afterpay, staff management and payroll capabilities, and much more – all of which work
together to save sellers time and effort. Millions of sellers across the globe trust Square to power their business
and help them thrive in the economy. For more information, visit www.squareup.com.