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Santa uses chopsticks

by Ethan on December 28, 2007

Christmas isn't the merriest day of the year for restaurant owners. Dining out dropped nearly in half on Christmas, if Urbanspoon's traffic is any indication. Not quite as dramatic as the Thanksgiving drop off, but still a big dip.

But clearly a lot of people are still eating out, and we got to wondering: where do they go?

We found our answer.

On Christmas Chinese restaurants made up one in every six restaurant searches on Urbanspoon -- over 16%. By comparison, on a typical day people only search for Chinese restaurants around 6% of the time.

We've reported before on the relative merit of Chinese food, but it's clearly the people's choice on Christmas.

Craving more statistics?

For those who are as fascinated with statistical analysis as we are, read on. While digging around, we discovered that while traffic was down across the board, the degree to which it was down varied widely depending on what city you happened to be in.

Christmas traffic as % of typical traffic
Calgary	40%
St. Louis	40%
Austin	40%
Twin Cities	41%
Research Triangle	43%
Pittsburgh	44%
Portland	44%
Boston	51%
Seattle	52%
Atlanta	53%
Philadelphia	55%
Chicago	56%
Denver	56%
Detroit	56%
Phoenix	56%
Orlando	56%
Cleveland	57%
Houston	59%
Washington DC	59%
Dallas	61%
Orange County	63%
New York	64%
Vancouver	66%
Las Vegas	70%
San Diego	71%
SF Bay Area	71%
Los Angeles	73%
Toronto	74%
Miami	76%

This means that if 100 people come to Urbanspoon Calgary on an average day, on Christmas only 40 people would do so.

This raises some questions. Why were only 40% of the people eating out on Christmas in Calgary, while 75% hit the town in Miami? We wondered what else differentiates Calgary from Miami, and leapt to an obvious conclusion.

If it doesn't snow on Christmas...

There's clearly a correlation between how warm a place is and how many people eat out on Christmas, but it's pretty weak. In fact, as our more scientifically minded friends have pointed out on our previous forays into statistics, you can measure the degree of correlation. In this case the so-called correlation coefficient is .36. The outliers here are telling. Why, for instance, does chilly Toronto eat out so much on Christmas? What's up with sun-soaked Austin staying in for the night?

Big city, little Christmas

Taking a different slice reveals a better correlation.

Apparently size matters. People living in larger cities are much more likely to eat out on Christmas than their smaller city cousins. We used the total number of restaurants in a city as a crude measure of city size, and that showed a much stronger .52 correlation coefficient.

So what can you take away from all of this? Not much. But if you want to avoid the family next year, move to a big warm city and go out for a nice Chinese dinner.

Photo available from flickr user Oldtasty under Creative Commons license.

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Santa uses chopsticks

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