A daily read on the independent restaurant

What Kwick365 is

Kwick365 — The Independent Restaurant Index publishes what America’s independent restaurants sell, charge, earn and are tipped, recomputed every night and printed with the number of restaurants behind it and the day it describes. 10 daily readings and 13 dish price indexes, nationally, by state and by metro.

There is very little journalism here on purpose. The site reports what the data shows and stops: no explanations of why a number moved, no forecasts, no seasonal adjustment, no commentary about the industry. A figure the sample cannot support is not published at all, and the page says so in words rather than showing a gap that could be mistaken for a zero. How the numbers are made.

What the network is

Every figure comes from the working data of restaurants that run KwickPOS, a point-of-sale system for independent restaurants — their own online orders, their own in-store tickets, their own menus. As of the latest build the index covers 1,957 restaurants, with published figures in 18 states and 7 metros, over 479 days of history.

They are overwhelmingly small, owner-run businesses: taquerias, pho houses, pizzerias, sushi counters, wing shops, neighbourhood cafés. That is the point — national restaurant statistics are dominated by chains, and the independent restaurant is usually a rounding error inside them.

It is not a probability sample of American restaurants, and it should not be read as one. It is whoever bought one company’s point-of-sale system, concentrated in the states that company sells into. What this sample is and is not.

Why it exists

Because the data already existed and nobody was allowed to see it. An operator who wants to know whether their average online ticket is normal for their metro has almost nowhere honest to look; a reporter writing about restaurant prices has chain menu boards and a trade survey. This is a third thing: a public, dated, sampled, reproducible number, free to cite, recomputed every night whether or not anyone is reading.

It is published by KwickPOS, and KwickPOS benefits if you think well of it. That is the whole of the commercial interest, and it is why the rules on the methodology page are absolute rather than editorial: the moment a number here is shaded to flatter anyone, the site is worth nothing to anybody, including its publisher.

Who publishes it

Publisher

Jinstech Corp dba KwickPOS, Houston, Texas, United States

Product

KwickPOS — point-of-sale and online ordering for independent restaurants

Press and corrections

hello@kwick365.com — a correction will be made and said out loud; a figure will not be pre-released or supplied under embargo

Citing a figure

free, with a link to the page it came from. Please carry the date and the sample size with it. Terms

Data licence

the JSON API returns published cells only and is free to use under the terms; no key, no account, no rate limit beyond what keeps the site up