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Mobile Device Visits To Full-Service Restaurants
Accommodation and food services (NAICS 72) represent the second-most important industry in the State of Hawaii as measured by share of total state GDP, second only to the real estate (NAICS 53) industry according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. When foot traffic is important to a business, as it is for the food service industry in Hawaii, mobile data can be especially useful for understanding the market. In 2019 alone, before the COVID-19 public health emergency, the SafeGraph panel sample collected data on over 14.3 million visits to 8,300 points of interest (POIs) in the food services industry (NAICS 72).
The graphs below provide an overview of the Hawaiian full-service restaurant market. The maps let you to zoom in and filter the details about increases or decreases in visits to individual full-service restaurants across different Hawaiian market areas. In the graphs, mobile visits to 4,300 full-service restaurants are aggregated by state, county, and district from January 2018 to June 2021. Districts, which bear a close resemblance to the boundaries of the old Hawaiian land division system, were used to demarcate geographically-distinct market areas. The maps below show the district boundaries and their respective core areas of full-service restaurants represented as a heat map. Because the SafeGraph panel sample size changes over time, some form of normalization is important in order to produce reliable results. Thus the final map visualizes increases and decreases in visits (raw_visit_counts) to full-service restaurants normalized by the previous month.
Mobile Device Visits to Full-Service Restaurants & COVID-19 Cases
The Data: The graph below pairs data from the State of Hawaii Department of Health on COVID-19 cases with mobile device visits to a point of interest from the SafeGraph panel of mobile devices (raw_visit_counts).
What To Look For: One of the mysteries about the overall recovery of the full-service restaurant industry in Hawaii as measured by mobile device visits through June 2021 was that it unfolded in fits and starts. Visits to full-service restaurants appear to be on their way to rebounding by July 2020, only to drop sharply by September 2020. Then mobile device visits to full-service restaurants start to rebound again in December 2020, only to fall backwards in February 2021. After combining mobile device data with spikes in COVID-19 cases, the pattern makes more sense. The recovery of the full-service restaurant industry was knocked down at least three times by three major successive spikes in COVID-19 cases. While the data story below ends in June 2021, it was only after February 2021 that mobile device visits appear to reach “escape velocity” from being dragged down yet again by the third major spike in COVID-19 cases to hit the State of Hawaii in April 2021.
Scroll over the graph below.
Mobile Device Visits to Full-Service Restaurants by County and District
The Data: The graphs below are raw counts of mobile device visits to a point of interest from the SafeGraph panel of mobile devices (raw_visit_counts). The graph shows an overview of visits to every full-service restaurant in the City and County of Honolulu before, during, and after the COVID-19 public health emergency, as compared with mobile device visits to all full-service restaurants statewide.
What to Look For: Overall, you should see a familiar pattern of major disruption in visits to full-service restaurants after February 2020. Because there are so many full-service restaurant points of interest in the City and County of Honolulu, visits to full-service restaurants closely match the statewide pattern. For most counties around the State of Hawaii, full-service restaurants in different market areas look like they recovered differently. For example, you can see that market areas like the Lahaina District on Maui and the Koloa-Waimea Districts on Kauai experienced much more dramatic decreases, and subsequent recoveries, in visits to full-service restaurants than other market areas around the state.
Scroll over the graphs below.
Map of All Points of Interest in the Food Service Industry
The Data: The point symbol map below is based on the SafeGraph geometry dataset with over 42,000 POIs in the State of Hawaii. The map plots the locations of full-service restaurants (NAICS 722511), other eating places (NAICS 722), closed eating places, and all other POIs in four separate layers.
What to Look For: Zoom in and hold your mouse over an individual POI to see “tags” describing the goods and services offered. You can turn on and off different POI layers, but use caution displaying “All Other POIs” when you are zoomed out. In both of the web maps below, the initial view shows you Hawaiian full-service restaurant core areas statewide visualized as a heat map. Districts are symbolized with orange lines (mouse-over a district to show its name). As you zoom in, the heat map will disappear and individual full-service restaurant POIs will appear. Use the reset view button 
to return to the original extent. Click on the search button 
and begin typing a name to search for a POI.
Zoom in, turn on layers, and scroll over the map below.
The State of the Full-Service Restaurant Market Pre and Post COVID-19
The Data: The proportional symbol web map below shows monthly changes in mobile device visits to full-service restaurants statewide (raw_visit_counts) normalized by the previous month.
What to Look For: Click the checkbox to turn on layers representing the state of the full-service restaurant market in Hawaii from January 2020, before the COVID-19 public health emergency, until June 2021. Symbol size is proportional to the increase or decrease in mobile device visits to a point of interest from the previous month, and the color indicates whether it was an decrease (red) or increase (green). Blue symbols mean the increase or decrease is outside the range of values in the legend. As you click through the initial COVID-19 months after February 2020, you see most full-service restaurants turn red and decrease in size or even disappear, while others appear to adapt and survive. When you mouse over an individual full-service restaurant you are presented with the following details (explained below).
For example:
Nobu Honolulu: 1881 visits (-442.0) | zzy-224@8m4-tbk-89d OWNED_POLYGON
KEY
Name of the full-service restaurant: No. of visits in that month (+- increase or decrease from the previous month) | placekey or unique identifier OWNED or SHARED polygon (owned means the point of interest is represented by its own footprint)
Zoom in, turn on layers, and scroll over the map below.
TECHNICAL NOTES
SafeGraph variable names are in parenthesis. For detailed information on how SafeGraph variables were derived, see the SafeGraph documentation. SafeGraph data was processed for the State of Hawaii using PostgreSQL and PostGIS then added into R. SafeGraph point of interest geometry data, including highly-accurate building footprints, is being continually updated. SafeGraph strives for coordinate accuracy less than 10 meters away from an accepted coordinate truth set (Google Maps). Please let us know if you recognize any coordinate accuracy issues in the web maps presented above. Graphs developed in R included use of the dygraphs package. Web maps developed in R included use of the leaflet package.
