Charlotte foodies and bar hops are still picking up the tab despite inflation, report says
Inflation has led to higher prices at restaurants in bars, but data show that Charlotte residents are still spending the same amount of money for a night on the town.
Since January, restaurant menu prices have gone up by at least 7.1% year-over-year, according to data from the National Restaurant Association, but the trend is slowing down.
Restaurant menu prices rose 8.8% between September 2021 and September 2022, down from 9% last month and the slowest 12-month growth since April, National Restaurant Association data show.
The price of alcoholic beverages at bars and restaurants has gone up 5.8% over the last year, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Despite the price increase, data show that consumer habits haven’t changed much.
Charlotte consumers spent just over $1 million in February, less than half the $2.3 million spent in January, according to data from SafeGraph.
Outside of the four-month period from February-May where consumer habits shifted, restaurant and bar spending in Charlotte remained roughly the same each month in 2022 -- an average of $2.2 million -- even as food prices continued to rise.
Connel Fullenkamp, an economics professor at Duke University, explained the drop in spending could be attributed to people wanting to stay in after a busy 2021 holiday season.
“The end of the holidays kind of brings all that celebration and going out to a hard stop,” Fullenkamp said. “I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t a similar pattern, year-to-year, just based on the fact that there’s this post-holiday letdown in late January to early February.”
Fullenkamp said spending patterns are , in part, due to leftover stimulus money from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since pandemic restrictions have been lifted, people are frequenting bars and restaurants to make up for lost time, Fullenkamp suggested.
“It still seems like people are going out more and catching up on celebrations,” Fullenkamp said, adding that some of his students have requested to be exempted from assignments to attend weddings and other family gatherings. “I think there’s still a good amount of pent-up demand from the pandemic to go out to restaurants and bars and celebrate life events.”
As stimulus money runs dry and the job market cools off, it’s likely that less money will be spent on dining and drinking in Charlotte, Fullenkamp said.
“We’re already seeing that a lot of firms are kind of giving up on expanding their workforces,” said Fullenkamp. “If that continues, people are going to get to the point where they have to start making decisions about where to cut back.”
