The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants
279 comments
·March 14, 2025deathanatos
Mountain_Skies
Several fast food restaurants in my town tried to keep their dining rooms closed well beyond the health emergency. They were reminded by the town that their business licenses depended on them having dine in service. If they wanted to be drive thru and pick up only, they'd need to convert to a different business license, including a new traffic study and payment of road impact fees. They reopened the dining rooms instead. A couple of Taco Bell locations tried to game this by having dining room hours that they didn't honor. Not sure if someone complained to the town or Taco Bell corporate but one day the dining room hours suddenly expanded and AFAIK, were no longer unreliable.
mjevans
Reminds me; I have a SERIOUS gripe about restaurants closing before their posted hours end.
I respect the need to have a 'last order' time, and __if they don't list it__ , it isn't unreasonable to assume that's the final time on the door. What if I want to walk in for takeout because I HATE using the drive through? (I do hate that, far less consistent food, no chance to verify it's made right.)
I do respect restaurants that list a separate 'final order' time and 'everyone should be out' time, that's good communication.
msravi
In India, these are called "cloud kitchens." A single cloud kitchen could be listed on a food delivery app under multiple brands - one brand for chinese cuisine, one for italian, etc.
ggzzzzzz55
It's 'ghost kitchen' in the US, but that's not what gp is describing.
pests
Might also be influenced by CloudKitchens, a company founded by the Uber guy. I’ve heard them called both tho.
ForOldHack
There are 'cloud kitchens' im California that have 30 to 40 "kitchens" at the same address, different apps. The largest on just has a double stove and cooks meat, side by side as the most kitchy vegitarian meals. The two roast beef sandwiches cost less than the salad, but the delivery driver could not hand us the food on premises. We walked outside and we're handed the meals. ( The vegitarian salad was in a separate bag ).
baxtr
Interesting.
In many industries there are contract manufacturers that produce products for many different brands.
DrScientist
Dark kitchens in the UK.
jajko
Hmm, did they lower their price correspondingly, at least compared to competition?
Because I don't go to restaurants to just eat, albeit fine food, I go for whole experience, environment. Something clicks in each human brain and we have this bubble of different vibes, for lack of better words. Plus social aspects.
Same reason alcoholics or anybody else still go to bars in droves, despite being able to just buy same alcohol in stores for fraction of the price.
That's why I pay restaurant prices for food that often costs much less in take aways or premade in stores. Michelin * are different but again the ambience is top priority there too, you won't get the star just for stellar food.
ThePowerOfFuet
>Michelin * are different but again the ambience is top priority there too, you won't get the star just for stellar food.
Au contraire: >A Michelin Star is awarded for the food on the plate – nothing else. The style of a restaurant and its degree of formality or informality have no bearing whatsoever on the award.
https://guide.michelin.com/us/en/article/features/what-is-a-...
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.
contingencies
Basically it seems after expanding to >30 countries then realizing COVID growth would not continue, rationalizing operations, and figuring out the model of ghost kitchens is limited in growth potential with significant customer and platform backlash TK's been trying to automate the production side using the "former self driving team" of Uber at a Cloud Kitchen subsidiary called Lab37. https://www.lab37.us/ However, the (2023) pictures of their system show they are not very advanced, and news appears to have halted.
Why am I monitoring this? I personally spent 9 years actually doing mechatronic R&D in the food prep, packaging and logistics automation space in China with more aggressive footprint and automation goals and am currently raising for US based go to market on a far higher density platform that sidesteps the last mile delivery providers entirely. Email in profile.
boppo1
How'd that go in China? Robot-burger flipping always seemed cool. With the level of automation they otherwise employ, why isn't McDonald's doing it yet?
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK
I noticed that food became much more standardized and similar at different places, maybe they are taking a page from McDonald's book and using some kind of a centralized model, where cooks at the restaurant just microwave and plate the prepared ingredients.
ravetcofx
This is yet another reason to stop supporting chains and go to locally owned independent restaurants. Good food made with usually more passion and care with variety and quality ingredients.
pyuser583
On the flip side, many bars and restaurants are throwing lots of attention to entertainment and in-person experiences.
It’s a lot easier to find in person entertainment.
w0m
Same with my favorite local Thai place. I still order from there ~monthly as it's great; but I miss the lunch option.
claudeomusic
This sounds too similar not to be - Fukada?
wat10000
This seems really stupid.
A restaurant sells two basic categories of product: food/drink, and service. Labor is expended on both.
They’re ignoring service and only looking at food/drink. The split between these two products has shifted away from service. That means more labor is going into the thing they’re actually counting and less is going into the thing they’re ignoring. Wow, productivity went up!
It’s interesting that the industry has shifted to more takeout, but framing it as “surge of productivity” is ridiculous.
mediaman
If you read the paper, they explicitly define "productivity" as real sales per employee. Your point about service versus food would be valid except that, apparently, they weren't being paid well for the service, because real sales went up per employee as a function of reduced dwell time. That means that service was a low productivity offering.
That you can explain the increase in productivity by shift in mix from low-productivity to high-productivity products is, in fact, the entire point of the paper, and does not mean that a "surge in productivity" did not happen.
The authors point out that a change in consumer demand preferences is in fact a type of "technology" in that it can be a driver of sector productivity. Not all technology lives on circuit boards!
wat10000
In the US, service is paid almost entirely from tips. The word “tip” doesn’t occur anywhere in their paper so I’m not optimistic that they accounted for this.
nostrademons
Another effect they're glossing over is inflation. They're measuring real labor productivity ((dollars generated / inflation) / hours worked), but usually the way you measure inflation in that equation is to plug in some society-wide metric like the CPI or GDP deflator. By most accounts restaurant inflation has gone up more than overall CPI inflation; at least, I'm spending $120 on a meal that would've cost $80 pre-pandemic, yet official CPI inflation over this time period has been only about 23%. If you use that formula naively, it looks like the earnings of the restaurant sector have increased (which, technically speaking, they have relative to the rest of the economy), but it's really because you're paying more for the same service than you did before.
mediaman
No, they're not glossing over inflation, because they were able to explain nearly the entire difference in real sales per employee between restaurants during the same time as a function of dwell time.
They are not just looking at an overall increase in sales, misunderstanding sector-specific inflation, and saying it must be dwell time.
It's a good paper! I would encourage reading it. They have specific dwell time data per location, along with sales data, and explain the difference in productivity by looking at differences in productivity between restaurants over the same time period, find that it is determined by changes in dwell time, and then find that the overall mix shift of reduced dwell time explains the overall change in real sales per employee across the sector. Inflation is not the explanation.
horsawlarway
Yeah, Marketplace on NPR covered this yesterday and came to essentially the same conclusion.
It's not that productivity is genuinely up, it's that modern restaurants are providing a different product.
Takeout/delivery to eat on your couch has different economics than a full service restaurant. Phrasing it as productivity is disingenuous.
dehrmann
Nit: Marketplace is an APM show--essentially a competitor of NPR. "NPR" has just become shorthand for "public radio."
brians
Also Marketplace airs on NPR stations. I have Windows on a Dell, and I hear Marketplace on NPR.
horsawlarway
Marketplace is aired on my local NPR station (WABE). APM is syndicated and broadcast on several different channels.
I happen to listen to Marketplace on NPR, not Marketplace by NPR.
lostlogin
> the industry has shifted to more takeout
Last night I went to a nice (formerly nice?) restaurant. Someone had brought their dog, their children crawled around my feet and one listened to an iPad on moderate to high volume.
I ordered my drink twice, and it never came, my side dish was ordered twice too, and eventually came.
I abandoned movie theatres for similar reasons. Maybe it’s time to abandon restaurants.
dehrmann
What it's really saying is we need a better metric now that front and back of house have decoupled.
dataviz1000
Simple.
The overhead on takeout is far less than dine-in although the menu items cost the same. Dine-in costs include base waitstaff salary and workman's comp, cleaning crew and dishwashers, electricity, insurance, ect.. while takeout requires the very small cost of packaging. Something that always bugs me is restaurants that charge $2 or $5 surcharge for takeout. I'm saving the restaurant a ton of money by not using the dining room, why would they discourage that?
> It cannot be explained by economies of scale
I disagree. Increase in takeout is an increase in efficiency for each line cook and emnployee.
There was a 23 seat restaurant on the top of the hill in Pacific Grove, CA in the 90s named Taste Bisto. The chef and his wife made a fortune from that tiny restaurant. He did two things. First, he set the prices so there was always a little line waiting at the door, not too long, and he encouraged takeout with an emphasis on making the food still look presentable when the person opens the container 30 minutes later at home. According to the chef, his real profits came from the takeout. From the point of view of the grill cook, grilling 8 pork chops or 18 pork chops at. the same time isn't much different, as the cook has to stand by the grill anyhow.
em500
> Something that always bugs me is restaurants that charge $2 or $5 surcharge for takeout. I'm saving the restaurant a ton of money by not using the dining room, why would they discourage that?
My parents owned a small family restaurant in Europe when I was little. We never charged extra for takeout, but it was viewed as lower margin as dine in, largely for two reasons.
1. For takeout we usually missed out on the revenue on drinks and desserts, which have enormous margins (think multiples rather than percentages).
2. A lot of the extra labour for dine-in was internalized by the family. Now you might object that using the wife and kids as cheap labour is not an honest calculations of the margins, but with family labour you can (a) largely circumvent the tax wedge (high in Europe) and (b) the presumably undercompensated labour is ofset by higher profits which still stays in the family if the head of family is careful with money.
Aurornis
> Something that always bugs me is restaurants that charge $2 or $5 surcharge for takeout. I'm saving the restaurant a ton of money by not using the dining room, why would they discourage that?
Take out customers rarely order drinks, which is where dine-in has high profit margins. The extra charge compensates for that.
The extra charge doesn’t discourage much because most people have already decided that they’re not dining in.
dataviz1000
I linked the Cheesecake Factory 2022 report below. I asked chat-gpt for some analysis and didn't double check the math so take with grain of salt. When you take into account the largest costs for Cheesecake Factory is labor of which 50% is waitstaff and leases for prime locations, profits from on premises alcohol sales do not compare to profits from takeout.
If 11% of sales are alcohol at 20–25% of the menu price and 25% of sales are off premises at 28–35% of the menu price, what is the percentage profit from alcohol and off premises food and non-alcohol beverage, assuming they are mutually exclusive?
To break it down:
Alcohol:
Cost percentage: 20–25% Profit margin: 75–80% Profit contribution: 11% × 75–80% ≈ 8.25–8.8% of total profit
Off premises:
Cost percentage: 28–35% Profit margin: 65–72% Profit contribution: 25% × 65–72% ≈ 16.25–18% of total profit
doctorpangloss
Cheesecake Factory isn’t representative of restaurant businesses. It’s like saying restaurants should be more like McDonalds, or startups should be more like Google.
vikingerik
> Something that always bugs me is restaurants that charge $2 or $5 surcharge for takeout. I'm saving the restaurant a ton of money by not using the dining room, why would they discourage that?
Because takeout isn't competing with the dining room. Customers don't go to a restaurant and then choose between those options; they've already planned whether to eat in or out. Restauraunts charge that because customers have shown they will pay it. Once you have that meal in mind, that $2 or $5 doesn't discourage you.
Larrikin
But it discourages me from ever ordering there again. There's a lot of restaurants out there. A now out of business restaurant charged the equivalent of a tip for takeout. I ate there once and just walked to the restaurant across the street that didn't charge me extra for take out.
linkjuice4all
This really seems the like 'oh duh' insight. The output of your revenue-making equipment (the kitchen) went up without requiring additional floor space and staff to serve a larger customer-base.
More specifically - the restaurants that survived (which is already a feat in and of itself) could serve more customers since they didn't have to turn as many tables. Even with the "overhead" of food delivery apps - restaurants could still purchase whole-sale ingredients in bulk and sell to more people without building out their physical plant.
To add - the dine-in experience has gotten faster. You don't need to wait for menus and you don't need to do the dance when settling your bill. Even if you didn't expand your delivery clientele you could probably turn tables faster without any 'hit' on rushing out your loyal customers.
dataviz1000
Maybe what is happening is before 2020 the people who carried the food from the kitchen to the customer were employees and after the people who carried the food from the kitchen to the customer are gig workers not employees which would explain "Figure 1. Annualized Real Sales per Employee (1992=100), Food Services and Drinking Places, Seasonally Adjusted" [0]. Restaurants now use gig workers and not employees to deliver the food. Of course, there are more sales per "employee."
doctorpangloss
Take out is terrible for restaurants. All the profit is in alcohol which people rarely take out. In distant second, profit comes from understaffing. So it should be obvious how and why productivity rises: in the absence of lucrative dine in drinkers, understaff. Then the denominator in the productivity calculation is smaller.
ForOldHack
Where does the profit from subsidies go to? A few years ago, McDonalds has subsidies of $1.5B USD, and $1.5B in profits. They really are a real estate company, and nursemaids for broken ice cream machines.
dataviz1000
> All of our restaurants offer a full-service bar where our entire menu is served. During fiscal 2022, alcoholic beverage sales represented 12% of The Cheesecake Factory restaurant sales. We offer all items on our menu, except alcoholic beverages where disallowed by regulation, for off-premise consumption, sales of which comprised approximately 25% of The Cheesecake Factory restaurant sales during fiscal 2022. [0]
Industry benchmarks for similar chains put food ingredients typically around 28–35% of the menu price and alcoholic beverages around 20–25% of the menu price. Nonetheless, making 2x profit on 25% of sales is incredible for restaurants.
At Cheesecake Factory, total food and beverage cost is 24.6%. Labor cost is 36.7%: of that waitstaff is ~50% of labor and kitchen staff is ~30% of labor. Operating cost is 26.7%. Looks like after other costs the profit was ~1.2%. Not much but that profit comes from the 25% off-premise consumption without alcohol.
Takeout for Michelin star restaurants is not a good idea. For almost all other restaurants, takeout is were the profits are. Engineering a menu and kitchen is like engineering a database, you have to ask things like are there a lot of writes and few reads or a lot of reads and few writes to determine how to structure it. When designing a restaurant and menu there needs to be equilibrium between how many seats in the dining room, what if any liqueur license to acquire, an expectation of percentage of food will be takeout, and menu items that will satisfy both dining room and takeout quality expectations. We eat with our eyes first even if it is opening a steaming hot carton of Orange Chicken from the Cheesecake Factory. There are always tradeoffs and it matters what the end goal is and more often than not the goal for both a database and kitchen is to earn as much profit as possible.
Some advice if you ever open a restaurant. The single biggest pain point when working in a kitchen opening a brand new restaurant is not enough storage. [1] You need enough containers to hold each of every element. You need enough containers to hold each of every element in cold storage for backup during service. Lastly, you need enough clean containers to switch the contents of each element into at the end of each night or to be dirty waiting for cleaning while the others are being used. The week before you open a restaurant, count how many containers you thought you needed and have in stock and triple that amount. Nothing will slow down service like not having enough containers. See, engineering a kitchen is like engineering a database.
[0] https://s29.q4cdn.com/187116270/files/doc_financials/2022/ar...
[1]https://www.amazon.com/Rubbermaid-Commercial-2-Size-3-Quart-...
kharak
What about the additional costs for delivery and online platforms? Both only apply for delivery and are quite significant. Takeouts should reduce costs, but delivery has significant costs added to each order.
dboreham
Those are mostly passed on to the customer, no?
null
jancsika
> Increase in takeout is an increase in efficiency for each line cook and emnployee.
There's also a kind of precarious food-business "art" going on behind your anecdote that follows the sentence I quoted (long line, but "not too long," etc.). In your single-minded speculation about the efficiency of takeout that art isn't present.
That art is the difference between this legendary Pacific Grove restaurant on the one hand, and a "for rent" sign on a failed restaurant with a fridge full of frozen pork chops and regret on the other.
dataviz1000
Art is one thing.
Business is another.
"You can make the best soup in the world, but if you takes all day to make it, you will never make a dollar in this business." -- German chef
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/
colonial
What I'd like to know are the demographics of the people using the delivery apps.
Everyone I know refuses to touch them due to the massive extra costs piled on top, but whenever I swing by somewhere in-person to get takeout, I have the same experience as you - there's always at least a few bags on the "Doordash shelf" or equivalent. Who's burning all this money?!
BrenBarn
I think tons of people do it. I have a cousin who moved to my town for a couple years around 2021-2023 and ordered delivery all the time. I have a friend in London who does it multiple times per week. I see a lot of food delivery happening in college-student neighborhoods. I think a sizable segment of the population has just gotten desensitized to the cost of it because they've come to see it as the "normal" cost.
mlsu
There is a sizeable and growing group of people who legitimately do not know how to cook a meal for themselves. They actually go a to a restaurant for every meal, kitchen is unused basically.
Eat at corporate cafeteria for lunch, doordash or get takeout for dinner. Premade salads and microwave prep meals is "cooking." Every meal.
freddie_mercury
This is extremely common almost everywhere in Asia. Many places still have SROs (which were outlawed in the US decades ago) which is essentially just a room and (nowadays) a bathroom. No kitchen so the only cooking tends to be instant noodles. Virtually every meal is eaten out or via delivery.
syntaxing
Anecdata, but I usually see people who live alone or DINKs that have been together for a long time use it the most often. Those who started dating usually opt to cook or go out together. Those with kids don't even bother.
solatic
When you never step foot inside a grocery store, it's easy to think that the price of takeout is just the normal price of food; that the "luxury" kind of food you don't eat all the time are the Michelin-star type places; that takeout is cheaper than cooking yourself because the restaurants do everything in bulk and pay low wages.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK
I'm a retiree. I don't have much time left to spend it on cooking. Going to a restaurant takes even more time than cooking. Ordering and opening the door is much faster. Anyway, my assistant does that. I do cook meals that take no more than 5 minutes of my time, like boiled eggs, rice, grilled meat or quick salad.
yannis
I am also retired and have more or less the same routine as you. I aim my own cooking time to a maximum of 7.5 minutes e.g. fried eggs and smoked salmon. I do open the door myself though. I hope you have an assistant because you can afford one and not because of some disability.
aprilthird2021
I was shocked when I went to college and we lived in a shared house for the summer to intern in the bay area, and I realized some people legit don't know how to cook anything, not even eggs or rice.
I tried to share my food with them but they didn't want it (admittedly I'm not Gordon Ramsey or anything). They were happy eating either frozen meals or doordash (back then it was cheaper) every dinner.
fumufumu
I moved back to the USA, SF in June 2021. I stayed with a friend and parnter for 5 days. In those 5 days they ordered via doordash for ~8 meals (lunch and dinner).
ein0p
'21 is hardly representative, depending on where you were. If it was one of the bigger cities in blue states, they were paranoid about COVID until the early '22.
safety1st
This seems to be the opposite of the trend but personally, due to some mixture of inflation, worsening service standards from the main delivery app where I live, and me just getting better at cooking, I've dialed back my food delivery app usage by like 80%.
Covid encouraged me to spend more time cooking and the result is that I now make better versions of most of my favorite dishes than any restaurant does (at least to my taste). I also worked out how to do their preparation in bulk so that they take a half hour or less to prepare.
This made me realize that meal delivery wasn't saving me as much time as I thought it was. Rather it was saving me from learning to cook, but you only have to do that once, and then you end up eating healthier, saving money, eating food that isn't cold because it wasn't sitting in a bag for an hour, and it takes less time than someone who can't cook probably thinks it does.
Grocery delivery on the other hand, now that service is worth its weight in gold. 2+ hours of work every week replaced with 10 minutes ordering online, which is mostly just going down the list of what I got last week and clicking add to cart.
hansvm
Another strategy I like for groceries is walking to the store during my "lunch" break each day. It's never busy, you get used to the layout and can shop faster, it's easier to only choose ripe produce and to be selective with temporal price variations, it makes it easier to plan meals around produce that's ripening faster than you want, and you don't have the chore of dealing with a whole basket of groceries.
It still takes 2+ hours of work every week, but I was going to be walking or doing some sort of light exercise eventually anyway, and the mental break helps with focus on coding the second half of the day.
rahimnathwani
They looked only at fast food, buffet and snack/cafe places:
The Spend data covers major national brands disproportionately, making it much more representative for limited-service/fast-food restaurants than full-service restaurants. We therefore restrict the sample to POIs reporting NAICS codes corresponding to limited-service eating places (NAICS 722513, 722514, and 722515) and associated with a brand for which there is non-missing visit and spend data. This encompasses three subcategories: limited-service restaurants (e.g., Taco Bell, McDonalds); cafeterias, grill buffets, and buffets (e.g., Hartz Chicken Buffet); and snack and nonalcoholic beverage bars (e.g., Starbucks). Our final sample contains over 100,000 unique restaurants from over 600 distinct brands. From January 2019 to December 2022, our sample captures a total of about $24 billion in nominal sales.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.
bfdm
Dying or becoming disable long term are also pretty bad for socializing. Anyone trying to take reasonable precautions for themselves or to protect vulnerable people around them has pretty much been jettisoned by society. Restaurants and bars are not the only way to socialize, but being unwilling to participate in those becomes a social death sentence.
I have a pet hypothesis that there is high correlation between the people choosing precautions and those who did the social & emotional labour of organizing and cohering in the before times. I'm not suggesting anything has stopped, clearly it hasn't. But it does sound like what remains is a thinner gruel barely covering the bottom of the pot.
BurningFrog
So what kind of macro event might nudge us back to sociability?
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!
uppost
A lot of the change in behavior probably corresponds to more work from home and social isolation. I haven't been to a sit down restaurant in over 5 years, but I still grab a to go meal about once a quarter. With inflation, I'm less price sensitive too when I buy my quarterly big mack, so I go for it and supersize, may get mcnuggets too. So work from home and inflation probably factor in.
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).
xg15
I wonder if there are also cultural/regulatory differences here.
I'm in the EU, and of course we had the forced shift to takeout as well, during covid. But while homeoffice as a concept stayed, restaurants very quickly went back to in-house dining when it was over.
Seeing a takeout-only restaurant with a repurposed dine-in area here in 2025 would be beyond weird and would probably just give everyone covid flashbacks.
Interesting to see that the specifics of what has stayed from the covid time and what has reverted could be different from country to country.
ivanovb
I'm an EU citizen and always saw going to a restaurant as a social event, somewhere to gather with friends, family, etc to have a good time. I never went to a restaurant to eat. Eating something delicious was just a bonus.
ksec
>I wonder if there are also cultural/regulatory differences here.
It has more to do with cost of rental and salary difference, comparing to median Income and spending. And it is a world wide thing.
tayo42
Eating out seems less popular in the the US right now. Everything is more expensive and there's the 18-25% tip that gets applied.
Going out to even a basic lunch with my wife is close to 50 usually for the meal.
Takeout I can tip the delivery person a little less. And keep left overs a little easier. Take out is only for being lazy, I'd still just cook and meet or beat in quality any restaurant except ones that mignt win an award or you can't do at home.
brewdad
Pre COVID, takeout meant not tipping at all. We should probably shift back towards that world.
lotsofpulp
Post Covid, takeout also means no tipping. Just because someone programs a prompt doesn’t mean it needs to be answered in the affirmative.
tayo42
I should have been clearer, meant delivery, only tip the driver, but its not 20%
UltraSane
most restaurants are absolutely terrible value for money.
db48x
Depends on what you value. If all you value are calories, then sure, there are much cheaper ways of getting the calories you need. But if you value time, or novelty, or the dining experience, or conversation with a neighbor or even just the bartender then there are plenty of places that cater to your values.
borgdefenser
The whole restaurant experience forced me to get more into cooking for myself because the value is just not there.
Low and behold it is actually fun to cook. It is actually more fun to be able to make a new dish yourself than to try a new restaurant. It is amusing how everything DIY is cool in hacker culture besides cooking. For no reason besides custom, people pretend they just don't have time to cook or that learning to cook isn't worth it. It is an obviously thoughtless idea.
Having less time to doom scroll your phone is a feature and not a bug.
walthamstow
Especially if you're anything above a 7/10 home cook
namaria
A 5 minutes walk from my home at the European capital where I live there's a Japanese food restaurant that has a small dine-in area where they removed all tables and just do takeout now. It's not that uncommon.
happyopossum
> Seeing a takeout-only restaurant with a repurposed dine-in area here in 2025 would be beyond weird
Well, I’m in California and I have no idea what that would look like - it’s just not a thing where I am, nor do I see it mentioned in that abstract. What are you referring to??
harrall
I’m in California and there is a take out only Dominoes near me.
The first In-n-Out had no seating or parking.
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.
ekianjo
> Becker-Friedman Institute of Economics. It is literally the Chicago school.
It may be, but don't expect organizations to remain true to their names over time. There are very few Friedman-minded economists out there nowadays.
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.
lukeschlather
No, they did measure them, they just didn't bother to value them. People are spending less time in the restaurants (<10 minutes.) People spending time in the restaurants are getting service (cleaning etc.) and use of the space/dishes. They aren't accounting for these services.
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.
guy234
Every sience has the dual purpose of performing measurements and identifying what measurements can possibly be taken.
florbnit
Food trucks are also more productive and since the study is a look at the market you’re part of the data that supports the industry increase in productive due to your switch from dine-in to food trucks.
pcthrowaway
People switched away from cash during COVID. Lots of people who might have been unbanked or lightly banked went all-in as everything went digital.
Now restaurants (historically a pretty cash-heavy industry) have fewer cash transactions.
Possibly related?
cco
Oh now that is an interesting observation. A long standing dirty secret.
Very maybe!
ForOldHack
Absolutely and unequivocally, the mismeasure of man. How exactly do you measure productivity in a restaurant? Profit?
If a chicken and a half, layed an egg and a half in a day and a half, how much productivity is gained by the chicken with a cell phone? A smidgen?
The premise is of course completely preposterous.
khazhoux
I think the move away from cash coincided with COVID but was not related much.
The convenience of digital simply made cash useless (mostly).
ekianjo
> The convenience of digital simply made cash useless (mostly).
Useless? Wait until your digital transactions fail or your bank or your state decides to block your access to your payment system. And believe me, it's not a "if", this is a real threat that will be waged against people. When it's technically possible, it always ends up becoming a reality. And by that time, "going back to cash" may not be an option in certain places, because of 'convenience'.
jryle70
And you may get hit by an airplane falling from the sky. Yet people don't stay home because of that. It's a risk assessment. The risk of getting ban from digital payment is not zero, but low enough that the convenience wins out. I haven't carried cash for at least a year, and almost don't carry physical cards nowadays, only my phone. Can I be locked out? for sure. Do I care? Not yet. You are different, of course. I don't tell you what you should do.
lxgr
That's arguably already the reality in the US to some extent. Many people I know don't even carry enough cash to pay for a single meal, unless they know they'll be going to a cash only place.
vkou
Is that more or less likely than the state deciding to block your access to freedom, and arresting and imprisoning/deporting you?
When you live in an authoritarian state with arbitrary law 'enforcement', the problem isn't the payment system that you're using. It's that you no longer live in a country of laws.
And that's not a problem that's going to be solved by using dead tree money.
khazhoux
I don't see the relevance in your comment. I'm saying it's useless in the sense that I haven't paid for nearly a single thing in cash in a year or two, and this is because of convenience and not because of COVID.
bsder
You missed the point.
The point is that a lot of restaurants used to not report a lot of cash transactions.
If almost everybody is using digital, the restaurant no longer has the option to underreport as there is an indelible transaction record (generally with an outsourced third party handling your credit cards).
So, some amount of the "productivity increase" is simply the underreported cash transactions now coming onto the books.
blitzar
Taxi drivers suffered the same thing with the rise of Uber etc. Every fare is now logged in detail.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)