Restaurant Sales – DC – October 2021

October Sales Cool Down as We Head into the Holiday Season

Before we jump into October’s break down, we want to make a quick note that our monthly weighted averages look a little different from past charts. We promise we’re not trying to pull a fast one on anyone! We have been updating and re-classifying restaurants by type, making sure that our data stays consistent throughout the future as we add more restaurants. It’s our goal to provide meaningful and, more importantly, accurate data for our clients and the industry as a whole.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

October’s sales were not as positive as we were hoping for across the board. Full Service bore the brunt of the drop, ending up at -12% compared to 2019 sales and Fast Casual thankfully stayed positive at 4% YO2Y.

In-house delivery sales shot up both in the DMV and non-DMV regions, adding supporting evidence to the theory that October might have been a rough month for sales thanks to some pretty gnarly weather.

Lastly, since we’d like to end this on a positive note- a big cheer for Full Service restaurants, which have kept up with Fast Casual for roughly the last 6 months! They took a slight dip at the end of the month, but we’re hoping to see the previous months’ trend continue into November!

About these metrics: The MarginEdge monthly snapshot of DC Metro restaurant sales is based on a sampling of 300+ area restaurants ranging from fast-casual to full-service.