CLAY: This is from Nate Silver, who runs sort of a data-and-analytics website that focuses on politics to a certain extent but also other data, and I just thought this was fascinating. OpenTable. My wife books a lot of our dinner revelations on OpenTable. Buck, I’m sure you’ve seen used this app before. I’m not claiming that it’s a perfect approximation of restaurant availability.
BUCK: I’m a super user, by the way, of OpenTable. Whatever the equivalent is of the airlines where they send the car to pick you up to take you to your plane, I think they do that for OpenTable. I’m diamond platinum status or something on Delta. I’m that for OpenTable. I spend too much money on food.
CLAY: So I thought this was interesting. Looking at reservations in restaurants on OpenTable, January of 2022 compared with January of 2019. And, Buck, listen to some of these numbers. Cambridge, Mass — Harvard — OpenTable reservations down 75%. The woker the community, the more they are destroying the economy surrounding that community. San Francisco restaurant reservations down 66% on OpenTable. I’m curious if you’ve seen this, Manhattan, down 64%. Have you noticed when you go out to restaurants that it’s a noticeably Spartan environment inside of the restaurant compared to past years?
BUCK: What I’ve seen in New York, Clay, is that it is harder than ever to get reservations in a lot of the restaurants because so many restaurants and neighborhood places have closed and everybody’s forgotten now. So you actually have a consolidation effect that has occurred. You also have more than ever — and people are gonna laugh about this in other parts of the country. I know. Laugh at us in New York. This is what we have to deal with.
You now have to pay often for a reservation. If you don’t show or even you have a 48-hour… It’s almost like a hotel. You’ve got a 24- or 48-hour cancellation window, sometimes $100 a person. So if you, theoretically, get covid and you call a restaurant and say, “Hey, I can’t make it tonight; I’ve got covid,” they say, “We’re charging you $100 a person for the reservation you’re not showing up for.” So that’s all over Manhattan now.
CLAY: D.C., by the way, down 59%. Boston down 48%. L.A. down 41%. Okay. Here are a couple of cities that are not as impacted. Houston down around 13%. Seems like there’s a lot of sane people in Houston. Las Vegas — I thought this was interesting — actually up 1%, and Miami —
BUCK: Oh, yeah!
CLAY: Miami, since 2019, is up a substantial 14%. So Miami restaurants, according to OpenTable data, are way busier — thanks to AOC and all the Democratic politicians traveling down to have their vacations, way more busy — than they otherwise would have been. And there’s a big roster out there of seven-day averages out there. I just wanted to hit some of these cities that are actually sane. Ft. Lauderdale numbers are up nearly 10%. Florida’s a free state.
Kansas City up 5%. Naples up 2%. Scottsdale is up. Vegas is up. Miami Beach is up. Tampa is basically flat. My home city of Nashville, basically flat as well. Sanity prevails. You got a lot of Texas places that are not that far behind. But the red states and red cities — blue cities sometimes inside of those red states — restaurants are still able to make money and run, some of them even more profitably. The more blue you are, the more disastrous the overall impact is here.
BUCK: I’m starting to think, Clay, that the same way that when it comes to Second Amendment rights, there are clearly two Americas.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: There are two very different countries. You can live in a state like Florida or Texas or Tennessee or a lot of other red states where people are listening to this show. You know, we’ve got a lot of people listening in Nebraska, states where, “You want to buy a gun? You’re not a felon? You got a driver’s license? You go through the process; you go buy a gun.” It’s not that hard, right?
In New York, buying a gun is effectively impossible, although I think the Supreme Court is gonna strike that down, too, coming up here, not far from now. So that will be good news when it comes to at least carrying. You have to be able to carry your gun. It can’t just be only for the range — and there’s no ranges, really, except for one in New York City. Anyway. But I think we’re gonna see this going forward with covid restrictions too. I think in blue states now they can’t turn this monster off permanently, ever.
CLAY: Blue is becoming bluer as a result of covid, and red is becoming redder. Here’s the question that I have, Buck, that is kind of hanging out there. Will there be a market-based reality in blue states? And what I mean by that is if you look at the data on where people are moving, they’re overwhelmingly leaving blue states and going to red states over the past couple of years.
Which, by the way, also sends the message that blue states aren’t safer, right? If for some reason it were way safer to live in a blue state, we would see, I think, population migrations going in opposite directions. Instead, everybody is leaving New York, California, the Chicago area in Illinois and they are coming to red states — Texas, Tennessee, Florida — places that have embraced freedom and allowed kids to go to school.
BUCK: If it were really more dangerous — that’s an excellent point — you would have news organizations in places like Los Angeles and New York City doing interviews with, “Oh, my gosh! I was so scared of the covid in Texas!” There’d be these kind of covid refugees from the red states, and that just does not exist, because even Democrat voters in red states are observing the reality around them and realizing, “Ah, I’m not… This is not actually ‘an experiment in death’ as The Atlantic once said about Georgia’s reopening.” Remember that? Oh, I’m sorry, “in human sacrifice.”
CLAY: Yes, “human sacrifice,” and I would also say this, Buck. The people who are moving are even more likely to have children. And the one thing that I think is true out there is, people do whatever is the best for their children. So if kids were actually in danger from covid, you would see families overwhelmingly relocating to blue states. You’d see this caravan of fear. It’d be like the Dust Bowl back in the day when everybody fled Oklahoma to go to California. Instead, everybody’s fleeing California and New York — and, again, the Chicago area, those are the number one migration places — and they are pending in red states. I think that’s pretty significant.
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