The restaurant competitor analysis template, and how to run it

The four columns

A competitor sheet with thirty columns never gets filled in twice. These four are the ones that change what you'd actually do on Monday.

• Venue. Your real comp set is the bars a guest would choose instead of you tonight — walking distance, same price tier, same occasion. Not the six most famous restaurants in the city. Six venues is enough; twelve is a project you'll abandon.
• Happy hour window. Start time, end time, and whether it's the same every day. Owners reprice before they re-time, and the hours are the cheaper lever: an earlier start costs nothing per cover.
• Food off / drinks off. Discount against that venue's own regular price, not against yours. A $7 happy hour cocktail off a $19 menu is a different animal than a $7 one off a $10 menu, and only the percentage tells you which you're looking at.
• Days it runs. The column everyone skips. Whether the block runs a weekend happy hour is a positioning decision you can make this week without touching a single price.

The sheet

Copy it, print it, or rebuild it in a spreadsheet. One row per competitor.

What the sheet tells you once it's full

Six rows in, the sheet stops being a list and becomes a position. You are looking for one thing: where you sit in the band your competitors have already set. Here is the backdrop to read it against — what the whole Seattle market does.

• Food comes off 28% at the median venue, measured across 201 restaurants.
• Drinks come off 22%, across 175 restaurants — the market cuts food harder than it cuts pours, which is where the margin decision shows up.

Those two numbers tell you whether you're inside the market at all. They do not tell you whether you're inside your block's market, and that is the one that decides anything. A guest choosing between you and the bar across the street is not comparing you to Seattle.

Every figure here is a median across venues, each venue counted once. A block needs 5 venues running a happy hour before we will state a number for it at all — below that we say the block is too thin to call rather than inventing a middle for it, and a missing measurement prints as a dash, never a zero.

How to read your own sheet once it's full

• Take the middle, not the minimum. One venue at 50% off is one venue. The middle of your six rows is the market. As one owner put it in a thread about a competitor undercutting him: nobody wins in a price war.
• Matching the price doesn't match the value. An operator who watches the independents nearby and charges what they charge was still, in his own words, "perceived as expensive". Price parity is not value parity — put portion size, format and room next to the number or the column misleads you.
• Compare like to like or don't compare. A half portion at happy hour against a full portion at dinner is not a discount, it's a different dish. When the portions differ, price the smaller one both times.
• Do it before sales fall, not after. The research pattern is that owners only look around once revenue drops — one ten-year pizzeria owner went looking only after sales declined and found competitors "selling their pizzas for half the price of mine". A sheet you refresh quarterly is an early warning; a sheet you fill in during a bad month is a panic.

What this can't tell you

The figures above are menu-side data, not POS data. We read what venues publish — happy hour prices against their own regular prices, and the hours they advertise — so the sheet tells you what the market offers and nothing about what anybody sells. No covers, no check averages, no food or pour cost, and no idea whether a single one of these discounts is profitable. It also can't tell you what share of Seattle's restaurants run a happy hour at all: HapHunt indexes the ones that do, so the denominator here is our tracked set, never the city's restaurant count.