That number came directly from the NRA Show floor this weekend. Chad Moutray, the National Restaurant Association's Senior Vice President of Industry Research, opened Saturday's State of the Industry session with it — and called the current consumer landscape "complex."
Here is what complex actually means: 35% of consumers now spend more than they take in every month. Four in ten reduced their restaurant frequency in 2025, and that pattern is expected to continue this year. Consumer sentiment is not just low — the NRA confirmed it has hit an all-time low.
The question to ask yourself this week: Are you running your operation as if your guest has options, or as if they have the same budget they had two years ago? Because they do not.
The National Restaurant Association Show ran May 16 through 19 at McCormick Place in Chicago — 53,000 foodservice professionals, 2,000 vendors, four days of data. The headline out of Saturday's State of the Industry session was not a surprise, but the specificity of it was.
Traffic has declined industrywide for two consecutive years. More than 60% of operators reported traffic declines in 2025. Only 15% saw an increase. And the operators who are winning are not winning because conditions improved — they are winning because they adapted their model to the consumer they actually have, not the consumer they wish they had.
Three things the profitable operators are doing differently right now:
This is real margin opportunity and it has a short window.
China was historically the largest buyer of American beef. With the current trade environment, Chinese importers shifted purchasing to Australia and Brazil. That shift reduced demand for U.S. beef — and beef is currently tracking toward a five-year price low heading into Memorial Day weekend, which is typically the highest-priced period of the year for protein.
The operators who catch this move their food cost. The ones who do not are still paying last quarter's prices on a contract that no longer reflects the market.
The tariff environment has shifted multiple times since January 2025 and most operators are not tracking the actual current state. Here is what matters as of this week.
The 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs is in effect for most trading partners, which has stabilized food price expectations temporarily. However, operators who absorbed cost increases during the tariff spikes earlier this year are not getting those margins back automatically — the costs were real and the stabilization does not undo what was already absorbed.
What is still in play:
Consumer sentiment is at an all-time low. Traffic is down across most of the industry. The operators who are still growing are not doing anything extraordinary — they are being more deliberate about the basics than the operators who are not.
Ask your management team this:
"If a guest who visited us six months ago came back tonight for the first time since — what would be different? What would they notice? And if the answer is nothing, what does that tell us about why they stopped coming?"
Most teams will struggle with the first part of that question. The ones who can answer it specifically — new menu item, tighter execution, faster service, different energy in the room — are the ones building the habits that retain guests in a difficult environment. The ones who cannot answer it are managing to survive, not to grow.
I was following the NRA Show coverage this weekend and one phrase from Saturday's session stopped me: "position yourself for success in the face of uncertainty." That is a diplomatic way of saying that the environment is not going to get easier and the operators waiting for conditions to improve are going to be waiting a long time.
The operators I work with who are holding margin right now are not doing anything heroic. They are reviewing their numbers weekly, not monthly. They are having vendor conversations that most operators avoid because they feel uncomfortable. They are asking their managers questions that surface problems before those problems show up on a P&L.
The beef story in this issue is a real example of that. Most operators will not know that beef is approaching a five-year low this Memorial Day weekend until their vendor tells them — which means they will not know until the window has already started closing. The operators who are running a tight operation check the market before the market comes to them.
That is what The Line Check Report is built to give you — the intelligence to make that call before everyone else does. If your operation needs more than intelligence — if it needs the infrastructure built — that is exactly what The Line Check engagements are designed to do.