Mirus Reporter

For those following our irregular updates on the impact of Covid on restaurants, the world turned upside down for many in the past week. The picture below shows the last 7 days of Mirus Index. What do you think is going on?

In the past year many restaurants have added new technologies to help with online ordering and delivery. Which means more systems and data to manage. Learn all about restaurant tech and data stacks and what the difference is between the two.

In a prior blog post, How to use PMIX Analysis, I wrote about Restaurant Product Mix in various stages of reporting complexity from Basic to Advanced Reporting and how each view can provide different insights. Today’s blog is going to capitalize on that prior issue but also take a different view in an effort to expand on the uses for PMIX.

In an era when terms like Data Scientist, and Analyst are commonly used in mass media, it is important to understand that interpreting data can be complicated.  It is easy to draw the wrong conclusion. I touched on this point in my material for Restaurant Finance Week last November. You should take caution when measuring your restaurant performance during this Covid period. Read on to see why what you see may not be what's happening and how a poor analysis can lead you to the wrong conclusion.

We have been sharing a story this year on the progression of Covid-19 and its impact on the restaurant industry. After months of steady improvement, there are signs that the situation is getting worse for the industry. The speed of the decline also seems to be increasing, at least in some segments.

The news and social media are filled with stories about dramatic new technologies like Augmented Reality (AR), and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and how these technologies are going to revolutionize every day life. Business Intelligence (BI) is part of those story lines, and the term suffers the same misconceptions and misunderstandings as AR or AI. These terms are broad categories of software, services, skills, and systems, but are not specific products or solutions. These terms are useful for discussing concepts and potential uses, but are not very useful to companies trying to apply them.

With changes taking effect across the restaurant industry in response to COVID 19 (full business shutdowns or limited operations), I'd argue that if you pivoted and changed direction and now offer online ordering, delivery and curbside pickup, then understandings around operational execution, while always very important, are even more critical.  Visibility into and clarity around that execution is necessary to your long-term success.

And that visibility comes from your ability to transform your data into actionable information which, in turn, delivers clarity for you and your team.

The Roaring Twenties has a lot of similarities to what has been going on in recent times. In the early 1920's, it was a time of hope and prosperity. With WWI over, the economy was booming, jazz was all the rage, women's rights was a critical topic, and people were out spending lots of money.

According to the Mirus Index, January closed with the best sales and traffic performance since 2015. Traffic, in particular, has been an industry problem for most of the last 5 years.