Traffic to fast-food restaurants slowed to its lowest rate since September as consumers continued cutting back on their fast-food dining.
Traffic at quick-service restaurants declined 2.8% in February, according to data from Revenue Management Solutions (RMS), continuing a return to the slow levels that marked most of 2024. The slowdown was likely brought on by a combination of weather and consumer weakness.
Net sales increased 0.4%, RMS said, as consumers spent a bit more when they went out. Most of that was due to price: Average price is up 3% compared with the same time last year. Average check was up 3.6%, the company said.
The biggest slowdown in traffic has been in the morning, RMS said, as breakfast traffic to fast-food restaurants declined 12.6%. The company speculated that breakfast is the easiest daypart for consumers to cut back on during difficult periods. Breakfast traffic has slowed the most over the past year, compared with both lunch and dinner.
One potential reason: Taco Bell, the Mexican fast-food chain, has given its franchisees the ability to cut out their breakfast daypart, and many operators have chosen to do so.
Lunch traffic was down, too, however, by 3.6%. But dinner traffic has been up for months and increased 0.5% in February.
The numbers confirm some of the weakness that restaurant executives have talked about for much of the year.
“The overall market is pretty muted,” McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said in February. He said that visits from low-income consumers industrywide were down in the double digits in the fourth quarter last year, and that continued into the first quarter of 2025. Several chains echoed similar sentiments, saying the consumer environment was weak beyond the expected impact from weather in January and February.
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