Restaurant sales don’t appear to be slowing down into April as consumers continue to spend their stimulus checks on eating out.
According to the most recent weekly update from the restaurant tracking service Black Box Intelligence, the industry posted positive two-year same-store sales for the third straight week. While traffic remains down—consumers are ordering more group orders still, as they’ve done since the start of the pandemic—they have been among the strongest since the start of the COVID era.
Such data continues to demonstrate a strong rebound for the industry more than a year after the start of the pandemic.
A report earlier this month by the financial services company Rabobank found that the stimulus could lift restaurant sales by 20% to 30%. That would exceed the previous two rounds of stimulus, both of which raised restaurant sales once they started to hit consumers’ bank accounts.
Rabobank suggested this round of stimulus would have a greater impact because there were larger direct payments, the economy is improving and more restaurants are available, especially when compared with this time last year.
“We believe that the third round of stimulus could provide an even bigger, and perhaps a more uniformly distributed, sales benefit to restaurants over the next several weeks, likely building a bridge to a more comprehensive sales recovery as COVID vaccinations speed up,” Rabobank wrote.
To be sure, there are other concerns at the moment. Rising infections in some states have raised the specter of a new round of dine-in restaurant closures—though there appears to be considerably less taste for that by decision-makers this time around.
In addition, a pause in use of the Johnson and Johnson single-dose vaccine—over just six reported cases of blood clots—could slow the vaccination program, delaying a potential recovery further.
Still, data for the most part continues to suggest strong results, though some numbers suggest at least a moderate slowdown. Sales were up 20% over levels from 2019 in the week ended April 4—down from a 24% increase two weeks earlier. At full-service restaurants sales were up 16% over 2019 levels, down from up 21% two weeks earlier.