Asian Restaurants Lost Billions, in Revenue Due to Pandemic-Era, Racism, Study Says.
According to a recent study, a racially-driven stigma in the
first year of the pandemic cost Asian restaurants in the
United States an estimated $7.4 billion in revenue.
NBC reports that the study, published last week in
the journal 'Nature Human Behavior,' found that Asian restaurants lost 18.4% more than other restaurants in 2020.
Following the outbreak of the pandemic,
the U.S. saw numerous incidents of anti-Asian
racism from harassment to direct violence.
According to Stop AAPI Hate, a national coalition founded in response to growing racism, nearly 11,500 incidents were recorded between March 2020 and March 2022. .
When you have something like folks
just choosing not to eat in a Chinese
restaurant, that is something that’s a lot
more subtle and under the surface,
but it’s also a lot more common, Masha Krupenkin, assistant professor of political
science at Boston College, via NBC.
According to the study's co-author, Masha Krupenkin,
the relationship between partisanship and human behavior
is one of the most important drivers of discrimination.
People tend to really strongly follow
cues from their party leaders. So Trump
setting an example and calling COVID
'the China virus' and really laying blame
on China, I think, was one of the key
drivers of the effects that we saw,
especially among Republicans, Masha Krupenkin, assistant professor of political
science at Boston College, via NBC.
According to Krupenkin, the report found that non-Chinese Asian restaurants had even less traffic than
Chinese restaurants amid the pandemic.
The team found that this spillover of consumer
discrimination was caused by most people not knowing
the difference between different Asian cuisines