Restaurants: BlackBox Index Rises on a Two-Year Basis for May 2021

By Ryan D. Lavender Published on June 10, 2021 at 5:22 PM

Earlier today (Thursday, June 10th), we learned that the BlackBox Index of samestore sales for May 2021 — importantly, these data points are on a two-year basis — was up by +5.4%, with two-year traffic off by -5.3%.

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Restaurants: The BlackBox Index for January 2021 Shows Stimulus Benefits

By Ryan D. Lavender Published on February 11, 2021 at 5:15 PM

Earlier today (Thursday, February 11th) we learned that the BlackBox Index of same-store sales for January 2021 was down by -4.9%, with same-store traffic off by -12.2%. The -4.9% figure is +840 basis points better than the -13.3% number for December 2020, and +550 basis points better than the -10.3% figure for Q4 2020 as a whole.

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Updating our Q4E Kalinowski Restaurant Industry Same-Store Sales Index

By Mark Kalinowski Published on January 25, 2021 at 12:00 AM

With this report, we update our data-driven Kalinowski Restaurant Industry Index for Q4E to -2.4%. While this is a lot better than Q2 2020’s -17.5%, and similar to Q3 2020’s -2.0%, it is somewhat disappointing in the context that as of mid-October we thought there was a 40% chance that Q4 2020 would turn positive. That was not meant to be.

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