Analyzing sales of the Korean restaurant franchise during the COVID-19 pandemic with the mixed-effects model approach.

Using point-of-sales (POS) data, the sales trends of 48 member stores of a Korean restaurant franchise during the COVID-19 pandemic were analyzed. As daily sales are nested in each member store of a franchise, the hierarchical structure of POS data was fully and effectively utilized by employing a mixed-effects model. The results showed that although sales volumes in all member stores were negatively affected by the pandemic, the level of impact varied according to store location: sales at some stores were drastically reduced, while a few others even achieved a slight increase in sales during the pandemic. These findings suggest that the government support policy for small business owners should be designed in a locally optimized way, to take account of neighborhood characteristics and the degree of sales loss for individual business owners.

Informations de copyright

Copyright: © 2023 Lee, Koo. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.