US pizza restaurant spending

In 2005, naming your baby Luna was a choice that invited questions. By 2022, it was a top-20 name, and Americans were spending significantly more money at pizza restaurants than they had before. The r-value of 0.97 across 18 data points is the kind of number that makes statisticians uncomfortable at parties. It is not entirely clear what a pizza restaurant has done to deserve a namesake generation of Lunas, but here we are.

Both trends are driven by the same cultural forces: the rise of millennial parenthood and millennial consumer spending. Millennials, who came of age with Harry Potter (Luna Lovegood debuting in 2003), drove Luna from obscurity into the US top names list while simultaneously becoming the dominant restaurant-spending demographic. US pizza restaurant spending grew from roughly $38 billion in 2005 to over $46 billion by 2022, tracking almost exactly with the age bracket where Luna-naming parents and pizza-ordering households overlap. Generational spending power and pop culture taste travel together.

A generation names its children and spends its disposable income according to the same cultural currents. When you track any two things that millennials adopted simultaneously, a correlation is less a discovery than an inevitability.