Dine in or Take out? Trends on Restaurant Service Demand amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented damage to restaurant businesses, especially for indoor dining services, due to the widespread fear of coronavirus exposure. In contrast, the online food ordering and delivery services, led by DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats, filled in the vacancy and achieved explosive growth. The restaurant industry is experiencing a dramatic transformation under the crossfire of these two driving forces. However, we are not fully exposed to those changes due to the lack of first-hand data, let alone the potential consequences and implications. To address such needs, this study applies foot traffic data from the Washington metropolitan area to understand the evolving trends of restaurant service demand through the pandemic. We first analyze the aggregate foot traffic volumes to reveal the disruptions to restaurant services across the different stages of the pandemic. A probabilistic learning model is then proposed to decompose the aggregate foot traffic by service modes into those for dine-in and takeout, respectively. The transitions in demand structures are identified for restaurants of various service types, price levels, and locations. In general, our results evidence that the overall restaurant demand still drifted around half of the pre-pandemic level, far from a complete recovery, one year after the mandatory lockdown was ended. But limited-service and budget restaurants, given their comparative advantages in takeout channels, saw a significantly more speedy recovery than full-service counterparts. Meanwhile, restaurants in exurban areas top the race in recovery followed by those in suburban and urban areas.