A historical context to the current state of the restaurant industry in Georgia. Restaurants make up a very significant portion of the Georgia economy. With more than 18,000 locations, restaurants create 480,000 jobs and generate an estimated $22.9 Billion in sales annually. We’ll cover the state of the industry in Georgia, and walk through every stage of the pandemic as the industry recovered to where it is today.
Movie theater traffic is currently at around 44% of what it was pre-coronavirus. This is up more than 100% from where it was in mid April (20.75% of pre-corona traffic). With larger chain theaters opening up again, expect to see this number slowly increase as people begin to come back out for movies.
TSA Foot traffic is up slightly this week, climbing 2.4% over last week with an increase to the daily average 16,537. Also, another month comes another sharp increase in air traffic through Hartsfield-Jackson Intl. The month of August saw an average daily increase of 20%, or 260 more planes per day.
The Airline Industry was arguably hit harder by the pandemic than any other industry, so the steps they had to take to stay afloat this year have been drastic.
This report covers the state of the industry prior to the pandemic, how it shut down, what Hollywood and business owners were able to do to compensate, when and how they decided to reopen, and how the release of Tenet might be what the industry needs to get back on track.
Labor Day weekend was a huge weekend for fine dining restaurants, with Sunday reporting a massive influx of restaurant reservations. The national average jumped up to only being -14% below normal traffic, while GA specifically reported 4% over last year. The weekly average for the country climbed 6.8% last week, while Georgia’s weekly average climbed 7.5%.
A new milestone has been hit this week for passenger throughput this week. The Friday of Labor Day weekend saw the first time TSA traffic had exceed 950,000 passengers since March. 968,673 travelers flew Friday, with a similarly large number on return flights on Monday at 935,308. The daily average for last week was 749,891, also a record. Labor Day is the last major travel holiday until Thanksgiving, and as the summer comes to a close, expect the daily average to decrease.
Restaurant reservations climbed by 2% this week nationally, with a .4% increase for the state of Georgia. Georgia seems to be rapidly approaching pre-coronavirus levels, one day only being 3/4ths of what it was the year before. Overall, reservations on the national and Georgia level are down approximately 47% of what they were last year.
What is difficult about gathering data for this year is discerning between seasonal traveler declines and pandemic related declines. While the daily average of traveler throughput dropped by 40,000 this week or 5.7%, this data would be misleading. 2019 daily average checkpoint numbers for the comparable week dropped by slightly more, at a 6.7% decrease. This means that though there are currently no signs of airline traffic increasing past 30% of last year at this time, it also isn’t being negatively affected anymore than it already has been.
Restaurant Reservations are up significantly this week, 5% for the US as a whole and 2.24% in the state of Georgia. This coincides with a decrease of daily cases in the US, as the country continues to quell the virus, these numbers should continue to recover. Currently restaurant reservations are slightly more than 50% of what they were the year prior. Fine dining has been affected significantly more than the rest of the industry, with casual dining and bars recovered up to approximately 70% of what they were last year.
Photo of an undetermined Georgia Tech home game during the 1918 college football season. That's when the sport was hit by the Spanish flu and the end of World War I.
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