You know what sold last night. Do you know what it cost you?
Free help reading food costs, labor, and margins for High Country restaurants, bars, and breweries.
Restaurants, bars, and breweries run on thin margins and long hours. Busy nights can still leave little after labor and waste. Comparing sales, ingredient costs, and shift records helps show why. In the High Country, the margin from leaf-season crowds and App State weekends may need to carry the quiet months through spring. Check those connections against your own sales and costs.
Your data stack
These are some of the tools that hold the records.
- POS
- Toast, Square, Clover, or Aloha
- Books
- QuickBooks or Xero
- Reservations
- OpenTable or Resy
- Labor scheduling
- 7shifts or Homebase
- Inventory
- MarketMan or BlueCart
- Mailchimp or Constant Contact
- Online presence
- Google Business Profile, Yelp, and TripAdvisor
Each of these tools does its job. None of them shows you how the jobs connect.
What connected records can show
POS + Accounting
Daily revenue next to the cost of goods and labor. Compare menu items by profit contribution as well as how often they sell.
POS + Labor scheduling
Labor cost ratio by day and shift. Where staffing doesn't match volume.
Marketing + Revenue
Which marketing channels actually drive paying customers. The difference between a full dining room and a profitable one.
Reviews + Operations
Review sentiment tracked over time, connected to what was actually happening operationally.
External data
Weather patterns correlated with traffic. Local event schedules connected to demand forecasting.
The difference between a full dining room and a profitable one.
What the season does to the numbers
The High Country’s year is not flat, and the public record says so plainly. These are figures I check when I build a forecast for a Boone restaurant.
Food-service jobs
Watauga County food-service payrolls held 3,105 jobs in January 2025 and 3,673 that October, a swing of 568 jobs inside one calendar year. The count comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' quarterly census of employment and wages, which reports Watauga County separately under NAICS 722, food services and drinking places.
Payroll
Average weekly wages in that same county industry ran $390 in the first quarter of 2025 and $462 in the third, so the season moves the payroll as well as the headcount.
Storefronts
The county held 152 food-service establishments in the first quarter of 2025 and 159 by the fourth quarter, in the same BLS series.
Lodging demand
Watauga County collected $4,391,198 in occupancy tax in fiscal 2024 and $3,570,109 in fiscal 2025, a drop of 18.7% recorded in the county's audited financial statements for the year ended June 30, 2025.
The student calendar
Appalachian State enrolled 18,124 students on its Boone campus in fall 2025, 6,200 of them in campus residence halls, per the university's enrollment report of September 5, 2025.
Alcohol sales
The Boone ABC Board booked $8,940,591 in gross sales in fiscal 2023-24, reported in the North Carolina ABC Commission's performance audit of the board published August 27, 2025.
Every number above is a public figure any owner can pull. The work is joining them to your own POS and labor data, so October’s peak and January’s floor show up in your staffing plan before they show up in your bank balance. The seasonal planner runs that comparison against your own twelve months.