Millennials Drive the Restaurant Business

Should restaurants focus on the demands of the Millennials?

Restaurants not only can give the Millennials (1981–1996) a cozy atmosphere to meet family and friends for lunch or dinner to have a chat or to share new experiences of their live journey.

Especially in these days I was reflecting on my own habits of spending time and money at restaurants of the last years. It wasn’t possible to meet my friends in restaurants as I was used to it due to the overall circumstances.

So I went more often to the supermarket for doing the groceries than I did it before. This made my experience in the love for cooking. These brought me to the point of thinking about my generation “The Millennials” and their life habits regarding food and joining each other.

I did a research and found the article “Consumer Spending by Generation” with focus on spending money at restaurants in comparison of the generation Millennials to their parents published on finance.yahoo in July 2019.

The article and the belonging chart not only report about the Millennials demands and their preferences it gives a broader overview about consumer behavior in spending money for different categories. Anyhow, I was inspired even more for my own story to have a closer look at the comparison between the Millennials and the Traditionalists (1922–1945).

For keeping and illustrating the general overview with one look, I designed a dashboard with the side-by-side bars chart. Then comparing the spending for restaurants instead for groceries is supported easily by the stacked bars chart. Reducing the colors to green and blue emphasizes the message and keeps it even clearer.

Insights the dashboard gives are that restaurants should risk a thought of concentrating more on the demands of the Millennials. This target group is at least doing groceries in comparison to the Traditionalists. One hypothesis can be that the Millennials prefer spending time and money with their age group rather at restaurants.

Giving the answer to this question is not a straight one. Still with all these information we need to keep some biases and limitations of the data in mind. In terms of selection biases the available data set was collected over a year and it’s due to the analyzed population sample size maybe not representative to the overall generation. Also we don’t know in which year the data was collected exactly.

Further data variables could be helpful, too, e.g. it’s also unknown how much money people spent in total. Also social desirability can lead to a given answer of people who have the feeling others could expect it from them.

This goes hand in hand with another bias called confirmation bias which corroborate a self-expectation bias, too, that younger people like to be outside and don’t want to cook for themselves. In my own case it was but it changed.

That Millennials spend more money in restaurants in general is not proven yet. It’s also not known how they would behave in a different time period and under different circumstances.

But what we can take away from that is developing the idea further and make us think about ourselves on our live journey. I invite you to take a look at the dashboard again to reflect your own situation in the relating generation group.

How are your habits in spending money and what is important to you?

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