Just as nearly everyone expected, the federal government shutdown and debt-ceiling brinkmanship undercut consumer confidence. The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index fell more than four points or 5.5% to 73.2 in the final October reading. This was down from 77.5 in September and 82.6 a year ago. The October reading was the lowest…

It’s a fact of foodservice life that wealthier households spend more eating out than others. The rule of thumb is half of foodservice spending is done by the top quartile of households, those with $75,000 or more in annual income. In this light, a study from an Atlanta-based group that tracks the attitudes and spending…

The Canadian economy and its foodservice market have been stagnant the past couple of years. Growth of real gross domestic product is forecast at 1.7% this year, after growing only 1.8% in 2012, according to Blue Chip Economic Indicators. This has contributed to sluggish foodservice growth. The NPD Group reported Oct. 22 that traffic for…

Nonfarm payrolls grew by a sluggish 148,000 jobs in September, according to the delayed federal employment report, released Oct. 22. Private-sector jobs growth was 126,000. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces the reports, revised jobs growth downward for July, but boosted it for August, leading to a 9,000 job gain over previous reports. The…

As we write this, it looks increasingly possible that Congress will fail to pass legislation to increase the U.S. federal debt ceiling or restart the federal government, which has been in a partial shutdown since Oct. 1. We said in our annual forecast back in August that we would be confidently predicting faster equipment and…

Writing FER Fortnightly Economic Report is more challenging this week in part because we are missing a number of key government reports. Among them are the monthly report on U.S. employment, the Producer Price Index and the Consumer Price Index. Nearly all of the statisticians at the Dept. of Commerce, the Bureau of Labor Statistics,…

Forecasts for growth of real GDP in the U.S. held steady in the latest consensus forecasts of economists polled by Blue Chip Economic Indicators. The forecast of growth of disposable personal income and consumer spending next year did deteriorate slightly. The current forecast for real GDP growth remained at 1.6% for this year and 2.6%…

Because the short-term economic outlook is so dicey, what with the federal government partial shutdown and the looming debt-ceiling deadline, we might want to focus on the longer term. Blue Chip Economic Indicators released its latest long-term consensus projections in early October. Most of the important numbers have deteriorated slightly from the forecasts last March.…

All four expectations indicators in the National Restaurant Association’s Restaurant Performance Index were down sharply in the August survey, including plans for capital spending. Still, gains in current same-store sales and traffic kept the decline of the overall RPI to just 0.2 point, to100.5. Any reading above 100 indicates expansion. The index has now been…

The second quarter of 2013 keeps turning out surprisingly robust foodservice data in many ways. We’ve written about the strong gains of the MAFSI Business Barometer and publicly reporting equipment and supplies company revenue growth in the period. Now the