The Curious Surge of Productivity in U.S. Restaurants
59 comments
·March 14, 2025deathanatos
tmpz22
Just look at the furniture in American restaurants - cheap, plastic, and uncomfortable, even in high priced restaurants.
I empathize with the economic predicament of restauranteurs but I'll continue to frequent establishments with better comfort features especially because the prices are high no matter where you go. Why pay $25 rushed sloppy meal when you could pay $30 for a better meal, in a better setting, and resulting in a better (earned!) tip.
tw04
>Just look at the furniture in American restaurants - cheap, plastic, and uncomfortable, even in high priced restaurants.
Seriously, where are you eating? Nothing remotely resembling "high end" anywhere near me uses plastic furniture. It's all well-padded wood. From steak restaurants to ramen to pizza, I can't name a single place I go to that's plastic other than the typical fast food joints.
Izkata
There is an in-between, log cabin themed restaurants that have wooden benches and chairs without padding. They're not fancy in any way, but they're not fast food either. Granted they're not very common.
satvikpendem
I agree, I don't recall seeing plastic in any sit-down restaurants.
satvikpendem
Ghost restaurants, essentially. Incidentally, I wonder what Travis Kalanick and his company CloudKitchens is up to now that he doesn't run Uber anymore.
krunck
Eating in American restaurants where there is constant pressure to shovel in the food and leave, is a waste. You feel like you're on an assembly line. What's the point then? On top of that they have the gall to ask for 25% tips. For what? Pressuring me to leave?
I enjoy visiting Eastern Europe(and Europe in general) where a party can sit at a table at 7pm, dine, drink, talk, and relax and remain there until close at 1am if they want. No pressure. Just spending time with people and sharing food together. The table is yours for the evening. No pressure to tip at all yet I tip generously.
America's got it all wrong.
JumpCrisscross
> enjoy visiting Eastern Europe(and Europe in general) where a party can sit at a table at 7pm, dine, drink, talk, and relax and remain there until close at 1am if they want
Would note that this is common at high-end restaurants in America. (Unless they sear at 10 or 11PM, in which case they may want another turn of tables.)
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supertrope
It depends on the restaurant. If there is a line of patrons to be seated they will definitely nudge you toward conclusion. Even if they are not busy the more customers a waiter churns through the more they earn. I find tips deceptive. One is not evaluating service quality. It’s just letting them advertise prices at 75% of actual cost before 20% de facto mandatory tip and 10% sales tax.
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alwa
How much of this is the COVID-correlated normalization of delivery apps [0]? Anecdotally I do sometimes notice people eating quickly or taking out, but what I really notice is the nonstop flurry of app delivery folks darting in and out of the pickup area... Seems consistent with the study's observations, too:
> As a result, we think the growth in take-out or delivery is the primary driver of the jump in short visits. With take-out, the customer orders on their phone and then comes into the restaurant to pick it up without eating there. With delivery, the customer orders food to be delivered to their home either from a food app like Grubhub or directly from the restaurant itself as with a Domino’s Pizza. It is important to recognize that either of these things connotes a substitution of home production for restaurant labor. The customer cleans up after themselves and washes their own dishes, for example. And delivery services substitute for the customer traveling themselves. But they are still, from the restaurant’s perspective, just a new stream of demand. If the restaurant can satisfy such quick-turn customers in addition to their regular customers with the same labor force, that would show up in the data as a clear, legitimate increase in their productivity.
[0] cf. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/doordash-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/grubhub-statistics/
cs702
Abstract: "We document that, after remaining almost constant for almost 30 years, real labor productivity at U.S. restaurants surged over 15% during the COVID pandemic. This surge has persisted even as many conditions have returned to pre-pandemic levels. Using mobile phone data tracking visits and spending at more than 100,000 individual limited service restaurants across the country, we explore the potential sources of the surge. It cannot be explained by economies of scale, expanding market power, or a direct result of COVID-sourced demand fluctuations. The restaurants’ productivity growth rates are strongly correlated, however, with reductions in the amount of time their customers spend in the establishments, particularly with a rising share of customers spending 10 minutes or less. The frequency of such ‘take-out’ customers rose considerably during COVID, even at fast food restaurants, and never went back down. The magnitude of the restaurant-level relationship between productivity and customer dwell time, if applied to the aggregate decrease in dwell time, can explain almost all of the aggregate productivity increase in our sample."
Huh. Interesting!
The finding is consistent with both the changes, since the pandemic, in my own eating-out habits and the behavior of other customers I see at restaurants I visit regularly.
Nonetheless, seeing it validated with an analysis of largish-scale data is worth the read.
The question is whether eating-out habits have permanently changed, or whether they will eventually revert to pre-pandemic patterns.
Thank you for sharing this on HN!
rickyhatespeas
I don't think the number of takeout orders will reduce much unless restaurants need a reason to seat customers. Many restaurants didn't have good or any pickup systems prior to COVID and many users hadn't experienced the ease and cost benefits of app-based ordering (reward programs, etc).
the-rc
I would have guessed that the surge had something to do with faster payments, namely contactless and the wireless terminals. In a way, it's even broader than that: if you order for pick up and prepay, payment is pretty much out of the picture entirely, replaced by just verifying that you are getting the right order. Then you're avoiding the productivity losses in serving the dishes, washing the plates, etc.
mihaic
This is a strong argument that habits formed during covid stuck around until today, as it was long enough to reshape the baseline.
Unfortunately these habits seem to affect the sociability of everyone, and I think we still underestimate what a terrible burden staying locked in was on the population.
BurningFrog
So what kind of macro event might nudge us back to sociability?
wormlord
Friedmanite economists lauding the "productivity increases" of restaurants, meanwhile I have stopped eating anywhere except food trucks because mid-tier dining is so bad now due to cost-cutting and loss of expertise.
Yeah that tracks for Chicago School economics.
mediaman
The paper does not cover "mid-tier dining." It covers fast food because that's where they had good data.
Moreover, real restaurant spending in total is up, so while your personal dining decisions are interesting they don't appear to reflect the aggregate data.
I'm also not sure why you are calling Goolsbee a "Friedmanite." He served in the Obama administration and advocated strong government intervention during the financial crisis. Do you think every UChicago economist is a Friedman disciple?
Lastly, where did you infer the economists are "lauding" the productivity increases? It appears nowhere in the paper. They only defined productivity increases and explained why they occurred. Was there some other reason you wanted them to be lauding it, other than to justify your anger with people whose policy beliefs you don't seem to be familiar with?
wormlord
> I'm also not sure why you are calling Goolsbee a "Friedmanite."
The paper is from the Becker-Friedman Institute of Economics. It is literally the Chicago school. Do the authors need to call themselves disciples of Milton Friedman?
> I'm also not sure why you are calling Goolsbee a "Friedmanite." He served in the Obama administration and advocated strong government intervention during the financial crisis. Do you think every UChicago economist is a Friedman disciple?
Most orthodox economists at this point are. Sure maybe an ideologically pure free marketeer would have advocated against government intervention in 2008. But do you really think this guy is outside the neoliberal mainstream?
> where did you infer the economists are "lauding" the productivity increases?
Neoliberal economists believe that productivity is inherently good. I don't see anything in this paper about quality of life of employees or quality of service. Elevating one dimension above everything else implies a particularly importance of that dimension.
lynguist
It feels like under whatever hood one looks or whichever layer of paint one looks behind - when it’s a relatively new change in society, one always finds the root cause to be neoliberalism.
Your comment reconfirms this especially pictorially with the last statement: productivity and it alone goes up and quality or service are not even part of the equation.
knowknow
I don’t see how explaining productivity increases that didn’t have a previous known origin is “lauding”. What measurable phenomena do you think economists should focus their research on instead?
BriggyDwiggs42
Actually wait, that’s the whole issue. The things being superseded for productivity here aren’t measurable.
knowknow
Then how would you expect an economist to study it, go to restaurants and report their opinions? The comment i was replying to is essentially being snarky that economist are doing what they’re supposed to. Seeing and explaining economic trends.
nortlov
My take away is that the overall labor per customer decreases because workers are spending less time on non-cooking/serving tasks. The paper implies the efficiency gain is in how labor is used rather than production or serving efficiency. This seems like an anticlimactic conclusion.
smelendez
It feels worth measuring formally so that the scientific community can basically treat this as a known, citable fact and have some numbers to work with.
I do wonder if the somewhat elliptical, high academic writing (“take-out” in quotes as if it’s an exotic term) and talk of a mystery being solved is to deflect criticism that this feels obvious or like a WSJ story.
relaxing
It never ceases to amaze me when tech people take issue with jargon in other fields.
The authors use academic tone because they’re academics writing for academics.
The conclusion might feel obvious to you (very conveniently, when you’ve already been handed the answer) but what’s notable is proving it with data and rigorous analysis.
bbor
Yup, they pretty much state that explicitly right in the abstract. I think we have a relatively rare example of a clickbait scientific paper title, here!
“If everyone’s doing takeout, you need fewer employees” isn’t exactly a shocking revelation.
copypasterepeat
I wonder if the surge in productivity would hold up if you also take into account the productivity of delivery people, who are with the move to delivery apps as much a part of the kitchen-to-table pipeline as the people working in the kitchens. I don't have any data on what they typically make, but my very anecdotal evidence suggests it's usually not much, especially when you take into account the gas, wear and tear on the car, etc.
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jeffchien
It's a little frustrating to me that the paper breaks out major chains as the big contributing factors, but doesn't analyze the remaining bucket. If possible I'd like to see the restaurants sliced by $/visit to see the effects on mid- or high-end restaurants.
Tesas
They probably offer less complex dishes with simpler to cook ingredients.
jacknews
i'm not sure how this is anything to do with productivity
surely that's when the same product or service is delivered more cheaply
the starting question must have been more like 'why are restaurants more profitable now'
and it's because restaurants are now selling more take-out meals; essentially a different product, which has lower overheads
jchw
Labor productivity is just a technical term in this case.
> The restaurants’ productivity growth rates are strongly correlated, however, with reductions in the amount of time their customers spend in the establishments, particularly with a rising share of customers spending 10 minutes or less. The frequency of such ‘take-out’ customers rose considerably during COVID, even at fast food restaurants, and never went back down. The magnitude of the restaurant-level relationship between productivity and customer dwell time, if applied to the aggregate decrease in dwell time, can explain almost all of the aggregate productivity increase in our sample.
One restaurant near me ditched its dine-in service entirely during COVID. They never went back; the dining area is now some odd mix of storage/prep/work area, and they're still take-out only.
Which is a bit sad; the dine-in area was a pretty cozy experience, and you'd get free tea with the meal. (It was a Japanese restaurant.)