MSP Regional Recovery Hub Weekly Take
The big thing you should know about economic recovery in the Minneapolis Saint Paul region for the week of January 4th
Happy New Year, MSP! This is the Recovery Hub Weekly Take, a new resource giving you the latest insights on regional economic recovery in the Minneapolis Saint Paul region. Way back in December GREATER MSP launched the Regional Recovery Hub. If you were able to join us for the Recovery Reality event you heard from an expert panel on the state of the regional economy and challenges of recovery. If you missed it, you can watch the panel discussion here, and look out for next week’s GREATER MSP e-newsletter when Peter Frosch and Audrey Lucas discuss what we heard from the panel.
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This has been a heavy news week in MSP. While we’ve all been glued to our media channels tracking events in Washington DC, some big things for economic recovery happened right here in Minnesota that will show up in the metrics tracked in the Recovery Hub. Which leads me to this week’s big thing.
This Week’s Big Thing: A slowdown in new COVID cases in December led Governor Walz to announce further loosening of restrictions on restaurants, bars, and other venues on Wednesday. This is a big win for restaurants, which were restricted to take out service and limited outdoor dining at the end of the year. Aligned with the increasing distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, the loosening of restrictions laid out in Executive Order 21-01 signals that we may have reached an inflection point for the hard-hit service industry.
Restaurants and bars have struggled, bearing the brunt of restrictions to limit the spread of COVID-19 and control public health. The Regional Recovery Hub shows that restaurant reservations made using OpenTable have remained consistently nonexistent since the week of Thanksgiving. Small business employment, which tracks employment trends for businesses using the Homebase scheduling software (mostly restaurants, small retailers and other service providers), dropped to 41% below pre-COVID levels the last week of November. This tells us that the impact to employment for the service industry, particularly the leisure and hospitality industry sector which accounts for 7.4% of total employment in MSP, may drop even further in December before showing signs of recovery in 2021.
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MSP isn’t the only region where state restrictions to control the spread of COVID-19 are hurting the food service industry, but it was one of the most severely impacted in late December. Restaurant booking activity in the MSP region remained the second lowest among peer regions with reservations holding at 98% below levels one year ago for the week of Christmas. This drop in reservation activity was only surpassed by the San Francisco region, as several Bay Area counties imposed stay-at-home orders in early December. Regions with similarly low levels of restaurant booking activity include Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Portland where there are similar restrictions in place. There are distinct differences in restaurant activity by geography. Peer regions located in the South saw decreases of 25%-35%, whereas peers in the North and Northwest saw decreases higher than 60%.
Source: OpenTable
Want to see the latest data and insights on economic recovery in MSP? Check out the MSP Regional Recovery Hub, which is live on the GREATER MSP Partnership website. The Hub is in beta, which means we are actively working to enhance the functionality to make sure it works for you. If you have any questions or feedback on the Recovery Hub, or would like to learn more about getting involved contact Amanda Taylor, Vice President of Research & Intelligence.