What a wonderful World Cup for Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

What a wonderful World Cup for Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

And Spain!

But The World Cup also exposed a fundamental flaw in how restaurants plan labor: demand forecasts are usually broad, but staffing decisions are intensely local.

Demand does not arrive at the city level. It arrives at a specific restaurant, on a specific night, often within a few critical hours. Two locations only miles apart can experience entirely different events. The ability to predict that difference, and deploy labor accordingly, is becoming a competitive advantage.

Ahead of the World Cup, one operator said he'd been promised a summer of Super Bowls. What he got was 9 extra Cowboys games. A nice bump, but not 9 Super Bowls.

City to city, it was a different tournament.

Kansas City struggled. More than half of restaurants reported an overall revenue decline, nearly a third of them by more than 10%. And almost 72% took in under $5,000 in extra World Cup revenue.

Miami fell short as well. While hotels had higher room rates, they did not have more guests YoY, and restaurants only saw a lift if they leaned hard into watch parties.

New York, LA, and DC boomed. In NYC, 63% of spots screening matches reported higher sales, with 46% adding shifts and 42% running promos. LA posted double-digit gains in revenue and orders. In DC, June and July are typically slow months for bars and restaurants, but some were so packed they were turning away business.

Then zoom in another level – two restaurants a few miles apart saw completely different tournaments. One Dallas steakhouse had its biggest sales week ever while a nearby pizza shop barely noticed the World Cup.

This showed me that there's no such thing as a citywide event having a blanket effect on restaurants. There's only its effect on your restaurant, on a given night. The restaurants that came out ahead weren't necessarily in the right cities. Instead, they read their own demand correctly and staffed for it.

If you were operating in a host city, I'd love to hear what you saw. Did the surge land where and when you expected? Drop it in the comments. ⬇️