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If you want to meet someone making a lot more — or a lot less — money than you, try your local full-service chain.
No, really: Restaurant chains like Olive Garden and Applebee's are America's socioeconomic melting pot, according to new research. A paper from Maxim Massenhoff and Nathan Wilmers, of the Naval Postgraduate School and Harvard University, respectively, looks at where Americans of different classes are more likely to rub shoulders.
"The most socio-economically diverse places in America are not public institutions, like schools and parks, but affordable, chain restaurants," Massenhoff and Wilmers write.
The researchers used SafeGraph mobile location data that tracks how many people are at certain places and where those people live, which can be indicative of income. Using that data, they were able to see how many visitors from varying income brackets frequent different establishments — and how isolated Americans of different classes are.
Broadly, Americans are pretty isolated by class. The researchers find that the wealthiest Americans are far and away more likely to encounter just similarly high-earning peers, meaning that the rich hang out with the rich. And isolation across class is more pronounced in urban and suburban areas.
This socio-economic isolation has grown even more stark since the pandemic. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that far fewer people visited neighborhoods where residents made significantly more or less money than they did in December 2021 than in January 2019. Interactions between people of different socioeconomic backgrounds dropped by up to 30% during that time period — long after COVID lockdowns were lifted, according to tracked cellphone data of more than a million people in Boston, Dallas, Seattle, and Los Angeles. The researchers laid the blame in part on the rise of remote work and online shopping in helping keep Americans in their own neighborhoods.
But there are some places where Americans of different incomes congregate: The aforementioned chain restaurants. Indeed, the sweet spot for cross-class mixing is what the researchers call "full-service, low-price restaurants." That includes places like IHOP, Applebee's, Chili's, and, yes, Olive Garden.
Other businesses, like pharmacies, grocery stores, and gyms, or public institutions, like parks, schools, and libraries, are not as diverse, as they tend to serve the people in their immediate vicinity, the researchers found. A higher-income person is more likely to meet a lower-income person at a fast food restaurant like McDonald's or Wendy's. However, it's not a reciprocal effect since those restaurants tend to see much more of the latter. At somewhere like Panera, poorer Americans are more likely to meet non-poor Americans, but not the other way around.
As the researchers note, all of that could mean rethinking policy situations for getting Americans from different income brackets to socialize, especially as some areas prioritized cutting back on the number of chain restaurants they allow. After all, research from Harvard economist Raj Chetty has found that being friends with higher-earners is key to your economic mobility — but many lower-earning Americans make friends based on proximity. That's why cross-income areas for socializing are important. You might just meet that rich new friend at Chili's.
