People are trading diners and dining rooms for dining in.
Restaurants (both fast-food full-service) are serving fewer and fewer people as grocery prices have fallen for the past nine consecutive months in the US – the longest streak of food price deflation since 1960 (with the exception of 2009).
These low prices of foods -- eggs prices are at a 10-year low and beef prices are at a 3-year low -- have created the largest gap between restaurant and grocery prices in the last decade.
Executives like Mike Andres, departing president of McDonald's, is lamenting that fact.
"If I'm not mistaken, it's the biggest gap we've seen in the last 10 years," Andres said to the New York Times. "This is clearly impacting the whole eating-out industry."
Restaurants also have to compete with grocery delivery services and meal kits that make cooking at home easier than ever before. Some analysts say the restaurant industry is headed for a recession, or at least challenging times in the near future.
But while dining-in might be easier than ever, that doesn't necessarily mean that more people are actually doing it, though the data contradicts itself somewhat.
According to the USDA, dining out surpassed home cooking in 2014, but there are hints that this trend may soon reverse itself. Data from January and June of this year show that people spent more money in supermarkets than in restaurants.
And while the National Restaurant Association estimates that sales will increase 5 percent this year, the growth rate of those sales has slowed since 2007. Sales increases are affected by an increase in prices.
"It is still overall an environment where consumers continue to use restaurants, but for the industry, it's a more moderate growth rate than in the past," National Restaurant Association Senior Vice President B. Husdon Riehle said.
Read More:
- Dining In: Homemade Chili Gains Ground on Chili's (New York Times)
- Grocery Prices Are Plunging (Bloomberg)
- Restaurant closures are becoming increasingly common in the US – here's why (Mic)
