NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WZTV) —A new data tracker from Harvard University shows that COVID-19 has hurt consumer spending in Nashville harder than any other metro area in the country.
According to the data tracker, consumer spending in Nashville is down 46.3 percent since January. That's 77 percent lower than the national average of 20.5 percent. And it's far worse than other major metro in Tennessee: Memphis consumer spending has only fallen 11.2 percent.
Nashville spending is down across the board and it lags behind the country average in most of the categories look at by the tracker.
Restaurant and hotel spending is down 77.1 percent, lower than the national average of 57.3 percent. Transportation spending is down a whopping 85.6 percent, much lower than the national average of 69.1 percent.
Grocery spending is surprisingly down 5.4 percent in Nashville while the rest of the country has seen an increase of 20 percent.
However, there are two metrics in which the city is doing better than the national average: Heathcare spending is down 36.2 percent while the national average is -49.8 percent.
And the city is trending higher than the national average in entertainment spending: -65.3 percent compared to the national average of 71.3%.
The Opportunity Insights Economic Tracker was developed at Harvard with the help of Brown University and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.