US pizza restaurant spending

As the price of a pint of lager in British pubs climbed from around £2.50 in 2010 to something approaching a small mortgage payment by 2023, Americans were simultaneously spending more and more money on pizza. The correlation of 0.97 across twelve years is a remarkable tribute to the parallel suffering of two great nations. What connects them is unclear, but the data insists something does. Possibly it is carbohydrates.

Both metrics are driven primarily by inflation, rising labor costs, and the shifting economics of the hospitality industry over the 2010s. UK pub lager prices are an extremely reliable barometer of input cost inflation — rent, wages, utility costs, and supply chain pressures — and US pizza restaurant spending tracks the same macroeconomic forces applied to the American casual dining sector. Both series also reflect the post-2020 inflationary surge particularly sharply. Strip out general inflation and both trends flatten considerably, which is the most honest version of this story.

Inflation is a universal solvent that makes everything appear to correlate with everything else when measured in nominal terms. Many of the most striking correlations in economic data are, at their core, the same story told in different currencies.