*What do rich people and poor people have in common? According to new research, it’s restaurant chains like Olive Garden and Applebee’s.
A paper from Maxim Massenhoff and Nathan Wilmers, of the Naval Postgraduate School and Harvard University, respectively, examines where Americans of different classes are more likely to intermingle.
“The most socio-economically diverse places in America are not public institutions, like schools and parks, but affordable, chain restaurants,” Massenhoff and Wilmers write, according to Business Insider. Their study used SafeGraph mobile location data that tracks the amount of people frequenting certain places and where those same 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.
Research shows that Americans are pretty much socialize with people from their own economic class. The researchers find that the wealthiest Americans are far and away more likely to encounter only other wealthy Americans, and the isolation is more acute in urban and suburban areas.
But there are some places where Americans of different incomes come together: chain restaurants like IHOP, Applebee’s, Chili’s, and Olive Garden. They’re what researchers call “full-service, low-price restaurants.”
Researchers found that 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. 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 lower income crowd. At somewhere like Panera, poorer Americans are more likely to meet non-poor Americans, but not vice versa.
As the researchers note, all of that could mean rethinking policy situations for getting Americans from different income brackets to socialize.
Speaking of Applebee’s, Jay-Z has gotten involved in the defense of a man wrongly arrested at an Applebee’s restaurant in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Watch below:
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