Justin Fox, Columnist

The Restaurant Boom Has Fizzled Out

People are still spending their money on dining out, but they're spreading the wealth among more places.

November 3, 2017 at 3:52 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Tough work if you can get it.
Photographer: Donald Bowers/Getty Images for Belvedere Vodka

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Employment at food services and drinking places rebounded strongly in October as waiters, cooks and bartenders in hurricane-ravaged Florida and Texas went to work. But that 88,500-job gain in today's employment report was not enough to erase something I wondered about last month: an apparent stalling of the great 2010-2017 restaurant hiring boom.

The picture is clearer if you look at the rolling three-month change in employment: