As of midnight on Wednesday October 1, the federal government shut down.
The specifics of what exactly that means and how long it will go on is something we’ll leave to our elected officials.
Instead, we’ll focus on the restaurants that will be particularly affected the longer the shutdown continues.
Because so much of the federal government is centered in and around Washington, DC, displaced or suddenly frugal federal employees could tighten their purse strings around discretionary spending like on restaurants.
To give you a feel of the number of people in the DC metro that could be affected, the federal government employs somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.2 to 4.3 million people, depending on if you count postal workers and military on the government rolls.
Meanwhile, estimates come in around 15% to 20% of those workers living in the DC metro area. Think roughly 600,000 to 700,000 federal employees in the DMV (DC, Maryland, and Northern Virginia).
That may or may not sound like a lot of people to you, but the population of the DC metro area is a bit over 6 million people, so we’re talking about 10% of the population worrying about their salaries and a good percentage of the others worrying about knock-on effects.
With that as context, let’s get to restaurants that could be particularly affected.
&pizza
This DC-based pizza chain has grown to 55 locations around the East Coast, but it still has over 20 of those stores in the DC area.
That’s around 40% of its stores, so it could be quite affected.
District Taco
As you can guess by the name, District Taco started in the DC (Falls Church, VA). It was originally a food truck but now has over 20 locations as far away as Florida and up to New York.
But 15 of the locations are still in the DMV.
Nando’s PERi-PERi
This South African chicken chain’s US operations are based in DC and of its roughly 50 U.S. locations, roughly half are in the DMV
Cava
This fast-casual Mediterranean concept (think Chipotle-like) started in Rockville, Maryland.
But unlike the others on this list, it has diversified geographically quite a bit. It now has over 400 locations across the United States with less than 10% in the DC/Virginia/Maryland metro area.
Elevation Burger
Elevation Burger is up to around 25 locations. Only 7 of the locations are in the U.S. with five in Virginia and one in DC. The seventh one is in Pennsylvania. Believe it or not, the rest are in Kuwait and Qatar.
Still, that’s still about a quarter of its locations in the DC/Virginia area.
If the federal government shutdown is a protracted one, many of these chains could be in for a rough time. The restaurant business is hard enough without additional pressures. We’ll see, though.
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