The Rural Food-Away-from-Home Landscape, 1990–2019
Dollar store expansion and independent grocery retailer contraction
Focusing on U.S. nonmetropolitan (nonmetro) counties as of 2019 and over the past 30 years since 1990, ERS examined the FAFH landscape across the United States—i.e., the availability of restaurants, cafeterias, food trucks and the like outside of the home. We focused on trends and differentiating features in FAFH access across the metropolitan divide and across the rural-urban continuum, using annual establishment-level data from the National Establishment Time Series (NETS) dataset. We found FAFH is generally less available in the most nonmetro counties. We also found, among the FAFH options in those rural nonmetro counties, there is a prevalence of national chain restaurants. However, this result does not hold uniformly. Counties with recreation as their primary industry tended to offer more FAFH options than rural counties with other leading industries, including nonmetro counties. Furthermore, there has been an expansion of FAFH in nonmetro counties, including the most rural nonmetro counties, led by growth in limited-service restaurants. These results could have implications for food access, overall health, and other consumer food metrics as the results relate to the food environment because FAFH generally offers a different nutritional profile than food at home and may provide additional convenience.
The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the ensuing policy responses disrupted how consumers in the United States acquired food away from home, and little is known about how they continued to access these goods. This report summarizes national-level trends in dollars US consumers spent from December 2019–February 2020 through April–June 2022 at quick-and full-service restaurants by service mode (on-premise, drive-thru, delivery, and carry-out) and acquisition and ordering method. Results show that while on-premises (eating inside a restaurant) spending fell at quick-and full-service restaurants, spending at full-service restaurants remained much lower than pre-pandemic spending levels. USDA, Economic Research Service researchers found that consumers quickly adapted to other service modes, like delivery or drive-thru, and this offset many of the losses observed in spending at quick-service restaurants. The authors also observed that consumers increased spending via cell phone apps for carry-out and delivery orders at both types of restaurants relative to pre-pandemic spending. In short, while consumers’ restaurant spending largely returned to pre-pandemic levels, many of the ways that consumers interacted with quick-and full-service restaurants immediately following the onset of the pandemic remained.
This paper examines the effects of dollar store entry on independent grocery retailers in the United States between 2000 and 2019. We utilized an establishment‐level dataset comprising all grocery retailers and dollar stores in the country. Our findings indicate that dollar store entry is associated with a 5.7% decrease in sales, a 3.7% reduction in employment, and a 2.3% rise in the likelihood of independent grocery retailers quitting the business. These adverse entry effects are three times larger in rural than urban areas. Event studies indicate that the negative impact on sales and employment disappears gradually in urban areas but persists in rural communities. We document differences in treatment effects of dollar store entry across regions, retail formats, and time.
