Black Business

Social movements boosted online orders for US Black-owned restaurants after the murder of George Floyd

Abstract

We use the rise of Black Lives Matter and the sentiment of racial sympathy to examine the interplay between the social movement and citizens’ sympathetic actions in supporting Black people. Using detailed food order flow information from one of the largest online food delivery platforms in the USA, we find that the total number of food orders from Black-owned restaurants increased by 39% relative to nearby non-Black-owned restaurants in the 140 days following the murder of George Floyd on the basis of a difference-in-difference model. The platform company’s strategic traffic allocation acted as an accelerator, enhancing the sympathetic responses of individuals, but it did not drive the entire surge in food orders. Protests resulting in severe injuries and those linked to demands for defunding the police diminished the positive sympathetic responses, highlighting a potential risk associated with protests. Our study provides large-scale, micro-level evidence that social movements and increased sympathy can foster collective actions to support marginalized communities.

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Fig. 1: Study 1, number of daily orders for Black-owned versus nearby control restaurants.

Data availability

The food order dataset for this study was provided by one of the largest companies in the online food delivery industry under a non-disclosure agreement for the current study. Upon request, with the necessary non-disclosure agreements signed with NUS, the dataset is available on-site at NUS to replicate all the results from the deposited Stata code. The data on race distribution and median household income at the block group level are sourced from the American Community Survey 2019 5-year survey (https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/data.html), and the BLM protesting data are from the Crowd Counting Consortium Crowd Data run by the Harvard Nonviolent Action Lab (https://ash.harvard.edu/programs/crowd-counting-consortium/). The data on COVID-19 cases and deaths are sourced from USAFacts (https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spread-map/state/virginia/county/bath-county/). The data on the Google search index for ‘black-owned business’ are sourced from Google trends (https://trends.google.com/trends).

Code availability

The Stata code used for data analysis in this study is available via GitHub at https://github.com/profgaga/Code-BLM.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge financial support from an NUS grant (no. A-0003917-00-00 to J.Z.). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. We acknowledge the food delivery platform for providing the food order data and explaining the institutional details.

See also

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. NUS Business School, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Sumit Agarwal, Yupeng Lin & Jean (Jieyin) Zeng

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  1. Sumit Agarwal
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the research design, implementation, data analysis and writing.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to
Jean (Jieyin) Zeng.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Georgios Melios, Donald Vandegrift and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Map of Black-owned restaurants and Google search trends.

Panel A presents the Google trends index of ‘Black-owned business’. Note the date on the horizontal axis indicates the beginning date of the week. Panel B presents a map that shows the location of Black-owned restaurants.

Extended Data Table 1 Descriptive statistics
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Extended Data Table 2 Placebo test
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Extended Data Table 3 Robustness analyses using alternative control samples
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Extended Data Table 4 Examine COVID as a confounding factor
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Extended Data Table 5 Goodman-Bacon Decomposition
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Extended Data Table 6 Examine Consumers’ Response in Extreme Red Counties
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Extended Data Table 7 Pre-existing vs. new consumers: a deeper analysis
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Extended Data Table 8 Long-run responses
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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Tables 1–4.

Reporting Summary

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Agarwal, S., Lin, Y. & Zeng, J.(. Social movements boosted online orders for US Black-owned restaurants after the murder of George Floyd.
Nat Hum Behav (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-02038-9

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