Why civil unrest helps America's pizza businesses


If there are protesters near your house, you'll probably want to order in rather than going out for dinner — or, at least, Wall Street thinks you will. In a perhaps psychologically revealing guess, stock analysts have posited that more civil unrest equals more pizza.
"After speaking with several large operators and industry contacts, we believe the recent decline in casual dining restaurant segment fundamentals — traffic down 3 percent to 5 percent the past several weeks — may be the result of consumers eating more at home amid the current political/social backdrop," explained an analysis from KeyBanc Capital Markets, "which we believe could last through the November election."
KeyBanc upgraded Papa John's stock to "overweight" on the basis of this report.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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