Dining room traffic in decline?
When restaurateur Andrew Tutt opens a spreadsheet for his TuttCo. bistro in St. Marys and compares sales to last year, the downward trend he sees certainly isn’t ideal. But it is a shared reality for many restaurants across the country.
“Looking at the numbers, it’s kind of scary what we are down compared to last year. I know we were brand new, but this is way more reflective of us just being a new restaurant,” Tutt says.
In fact, according to popular restaurant reservations platform Open Table, traffic to restaurant dining rooms across the country has seen a steady decline since June with an even steeper slide in the past three months. Open Table data is generated from tracking online, phone and walk-in reservations year over year.
Widespread inflation, rising food costs, skyrocketing mortgages and general rate hikes across the board have hurt most sectors of the economy. And when it comes to restaurants, dining-out traffic has been affected and customers are pulling back on discretionary spending …
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