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17 Comments so far
leave a commentthis is totally unreadable
People obviously are leaning towards eating out at places they can save money, like Taco Bell and IHOP. But I can also see why more people would eat at nicer places like Olive Garden – less and less are going to spend $100 going to a sporting event or a play, etc. Instead, they probably just go out to eat and head home to play a board game.
Dude, have you ever been to IHOP? A stack of pancakes for 8 frickn dollars is not what I call saving money.
Olive Garden is not a “nice” place to eat. its pretty much the cheapest imitation of Italian food that any American can find.
dominoes is fast food??
This is worthless data; it is from Mint users (whatever those are) who decided to vote – this is not Americans, like the title misleadingly suggests.
well, with a name like that, I guess you’re not the least bit concerned with taking a dump on someone’s hard work.
…while I do think the graphics is very USA-Today-like; it’s not nearly as insightful in terms of consumer purchasing patterns. (I tend to agree with Jeff’s statements below)
I would have figured folks with less disposable income might be more thoughtfully restrained; and folks with highly leveraged financials might lean towards more credit card purchases.
For the restaurant owners out there; you would think in a down economy, it may be a good time to carefully re-evaluating the lower cost dollar menu or focus more on the appetizers menu.
This really makes no sense, Harvey’s is a Canadian fast food chain with only a few stores and where is Mcdonalds?
welcome all to the slowest loading website in the universe.
To really understand what these numbers show, we have to see the same numbers for grocery stores and entertainment, because these are the two substitutes for going out to eat.
Since Mint only looks at non-cash transactions, isn’t this just actually showing that credit/debit based transactions are increasing at these places? Further, since debit only accounts for, at most, 50% of card based transactions, wouldn’t it mean that these places are seeing a significant increase in CREDIT purchases as well?
While that might be great for these companies, I don’t think it’s great for the people using credit cards (at insane interest rates) to purchase fast food. This is bad.
These restaurants dont serve food, they serve “food like” products . . .Yuck
I am astounded that someone called Olive Garden a nice place to eat. I’d rather eat from a dumpster!
Well, he didn’t actually call Olive Garden nice…he called it NICER than Taco Bell or IHOP.
Where does chipotle stand? They are doing very well.
So I love the graphic and I think the data is sound and disagree with Jeff or Heywood. (1 million people for 300 million+ Americans is a pretty decent sample) but the relevancy is lacking.
For instance, what if I said fast food sales normally increase in Q2? Think about this. Maybe its just an annual trend. It is getting warmer and people are on the go spending more time outside and want quick food?
What I would need to see for this to have some relevancy to the economy is year over year sales, or the % increase in this year over last year for comparable sales. In this case comparable would be mint.com users who have used the site for over a year. This is how chain restaurants, retailers, etc. look at their sales.
For instance Burger King just released that they are having the worst year since 2006 and down ~3% to last year. Here you would think they shuttering McDs left and right.
Agreed that this needs a same time period comparison to last year, and weather is a huge factor. Q2 typically has better weather than Q1.