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RESEARCH Dining Out or Eating In: Where does your city rank?

Spending Growth at Restaurants

The local restaurant scene is an important gauge of the vitality of a city. Restaurants can be a place to commemorate birthdays and milestones, a backdrop to seal business deals, and a prime location for date night. The food scene is an important amenity that attracts talented workers and can make a city a tourist destination. The JPMorgan Chase Institute's recently released Profiles of Local Consumer Commerce (PLCC) uses 12.4 billion anonymized credit and debit card transactions in 15 metropolitan areas to increase understanding of how restaurants are performing.

 

Which metro area has the most spending growth at restaurants?

 

2015 Q2
Rank Metro Area Growth Rate
1 Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI 10.5%
2 Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA 9.2%
3 Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA 9.1%
4 Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL 8.9%
5 Denver-Aurora-Lakewood, CO 8.7%
6 Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheimn, CA 8.5%
7 San Diego-Carlsbad, CA 8.5%
8 Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX 8.0%
- Fifteen City Average 7.8%
9 New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA 7.7%
10 Columbus, OH 7.0%
11 San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA 6.6%
12 Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA 6.5%
13 Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, AZ 6.3%
14 Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN-WI 6.3%
15 Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, TX 5.4%

 

Detroit had the fastest growth of restaurants in the second quarter of 2015 with year over year growth of 10.5 percent. The slowest growth was in Houston where spending increased 5.4 percent. Although Detroit grew at almost double the rate as Houston, the increase in spending was uniformly high across the board. For the fifteen cities, the average growth rate was 7.8 percent.

 

 

Restaurant spending has been a consistent bright spot for local economies, with all cities growing faster than 5 percent in the second quarter of 2015. The graph above shows that in recent years, spending on services has grown more rapidly than spending on goods, and that spending on restaurants specifically has grown faster than other services for most recent months. Restaurants are important pillars of local economies. By providing a unique high-frequency and geographically specific lens on the growth of restaurants and services, the PLCC data shed new light on this central feature of local economies.

The JPMorgan Chase Institute is committed to delivering data-rich analyses and expert insights for the public good. Our recently released report Profiles of Local Consumer Commerce tells the story of the decline in everyday retail spending across fifteen metro areas. As part of a five week series, the JPMC Institute will explore the differences between the metro areas through a series of blog posts ranking the cities across select dimensions from the report. Last week we looked at Spending by Visitors.