By Ryan D. Lavender
Published on February 16, 2021 at 4:59 PM
In December, we published a report — “Look to Popeyes to Learn about Domino’s and Papa John’s” — in which we noted that Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen would lap highly challenging same-store sales comparisons before Domino’s and Papa John’s would, and how Popeyes performed might have some lessons for these pizza players. Since then, Popeyes’ parent company Restaurant Brands International (QSR; Not Rated) reported that Popeyes’ Q4 2020 U.S. same-store sales declined by -6.4%. This, of course, lapped Popeyes’ Q4 2019 U.S. same-store sales advance of +37.9% — the best quarter for any publicly-traded restaurant concept of meaningful size of which we are aware.
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By Mark Kalinowski
Published on December 8, 2020 at 12:00 AM
About six months ago, we published a report examining market-share opportunities within the casual dining sector. In this report, we update our numbers. One of the important changes is that we now look for 8%-20% of the casual dining restaurants in the U.S. that were in operation as of the start of 2020 to be closed permanently by the end of March 2021. (Previously, we were looking for 3%-15% of casual dining restaurants to be closed permanently by the end of December 2020.) Keep in mind that we expect these closures to be heavily weighted toward independents/momand-pops and, to a somewhat lesser degree, smaller (privately-held in nearly all cases) restaurant chains.
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By Mark Kalinowski
Published on March 3, 2019 at 12:00 AM
On its January 24th conference call, Starbucks (SBUX; Neutral) management commented that “Starbucks Rewards continues to be a powerful enabler of loyalty and we are thoughtfully evolving the program to provide greater choice and flexibility for Rewards members. We will enhance the program this spring to enable loyalty customers to earn and redeem more quickly and redeem those awards across a broader range of items in our stores.” In this report, we report on what we hear will be the changes to the loyalty program (timing likely to be April or May).
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