Restaurant spending per capita

It is a curious fact, and one that would have delighted anyone with a taste for the absurd, that Americans spending less money on restaurant meals correlates almost perfectly with mail carriers being bitten fewer times by dogs. One might imagine these two phenomena occupying entirely separate universes of causation, yet here they are, moving in inverse tandem like a pair of cosmic dancers who have never met but cannot seem to stop stepping on each other's toes. The universe, it seems, does enjoy a joke at our expense.

The most plausible explanation involves the economic squeeze of 2016 to 2022, a period when disposable income fluctuated considerably and people made different choices about where to spend their money. As restaurant spending declined during economic uncertainty, households may have invested in home improvements and yard maintenance, which often correlates with increased dog ownership and better-maintained properties. Consider that in 2020 alone, dog adoptions in the United States increased by roughly 23 percent, and suddenly you have more dogs, more confident dogs, and fewer mail carriers encountering them in the stressed environment of an economically turbulent neighborhood—a single thread that could pull both statistics in opposite directions.

We are pattern-seeking creatures who live on a planet that occasionally rewards us with genuine correlations between things that have no business being related at all. The correlation between restaurant spending and dog bite incidents is either a window into some deeper economic mechanism we don't quite understand, or evidence that the universe simply enjoys reminding us how little we know. Or both, which is somehow worse.