It’s not clear what will happen to the restaurant industry if this trend becomes permanent once the pandemic is over
A new report shows many Canadians like the taste of telecommuting and want to continue working from home after the pandemic.
However, the change in lifestyle is expected to affect the restaurant industry to the tune of $20 billion in the next year.
The Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, in partnership with the Caddle app, surveyed almost 11,000 Canadians last month to assess how many are thinking of altering their way of living to spend more time working from their home.
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About one-quarter of those surveyed say they plan to work from home more often during the next year. Over a third said they can’t work from home, while the remaining 40 percent are not sure what they’ll be doing.
The percentage of people wanting to work from home on the Prairies is slightly lower compared to Quebec and Ontario.
About 22 percent of Albertans are planning to work more often from home, followed by Manitoba and Saskatchewan at 17.4 percent and 16.9 percent, respectively.
Of those who intend to work from home and telecommute, 57 percent plan to spend less money at restaurants.
Saskatchewan is on par with this national average, while Alberta is slightly higher at 59 percent and Manitoba a little lower at 53 percent.
“You have really three factors affecting the hospitality industry right now,” said Sylvain Charlebois, scientific director at the Agri-Food Analytics Lab.
“First of all is the fear and the anxiety. People just don’t want to go out, even though they could afford it. That’s a decent portion of the market right now and that’s going to go on for a while until we get a vaccine. Another factor is the economics of food consumption. A lot of people lost their jobs. Their budget is tighter than before so they just can’t afford to go out. The third factor, which is the one we looked into much more seriously, is the effects of telecommuting. There’s no vaccine for that. Once you get the market to move, and once you allow people to believe that their address no longer matters, a lot of things can happen.”
More than a third of those questioned said they enjoyed working from home more than they would have expected before the pandemic. Quebec had the highest satisfactory rate at 38.5 percent.
Saskatchewan respondents were close at 37.8 percent, followed by Alberta and Manitoba at 36.6.
“It may not sound like a high percentage, but it is high considering that 34 percent said they don’t know and 20.9 percent said that they don’t have a job right now. So there’s a lot of uncertainty out there. A lot of people actually have no clue where they’re going to be in a year from now,” Charlebois said.
“People actually are starting to enjoy this — people who have jobs.”
When asked whether their employer is planning to allow telecommuting from home, about 22 percent of respondents said yes: Alberta, 23.7 percent; Manitoba, 17.4 percent and Saskatchewan, 12.8 percent.
Of those who said their employer plans to allow them to work from home, about half said they expect to do it permanently.
“You could have people living in Saskatchewan, but they work in Toronto. Telecommuting can actually open up a variety of possibilities,” said Charlebois.
“Because of the pandemic, it’s building a case for both employers and employees to look at the use of technology.”
Seventy percent of these respondents intend to spend much less time and money at restaurants, which could have a significant effect on the food services industry as more people work from home and potentially outside of urban cores.
Thirty-seven percent of respondents said they went to a restaurant for a meal, takeout or coffee break at least twice a week before the pandemic started. That number goes down to 23 percent when respondents talk about what they expect will happen following the pandemic.
However, more people are willing to visit a restaurant (76.7 percent) once a week after the pandemic as compared to 63 percent before the pandemic.
The shift in work locations may also be responsible for at least 30 percent of lost sales in food service for this coming year alone, which will affect restaurants in metropolitan centres the most.
“All cities on the Prairies, their ratio of restaurants per capita is pretty high. There are a lot of restaurants, but a lot of them won’t survive, unfortunately,” he said.
Restaurant operations will need to adjust to changing demographics away from downtown locations and out to suburbia and rural areas.
“I would say that the pie has shrunk. The biggest challenge for the food service industry is to get us out of the kitchen. And that’s not going to be easy because you save money if you spend more time in the kitchen,” he said.
To calculate the financial impact on the food industry, researchers used the information collected from the survey along with predictive analytics and artificial intelligence.
However, after consulting with experts at Restaurant Canada, they were informed the losses to the industry could be much greater than $20 billion, which represents about 25 percent of the entire industry.
“They actually believe that our forecast is very conservative. They think it’s going to be more than that,” he said.
