Weekend vs Weekday Spending by Neighborhood and Industry

As almost anyone who works in the restaurant or retail business will tell you, weekends are the busy shifts.  Americans have told polls that the day they spend the most is Saturday , followed by Fridays. However, there is some evidence that  spending patterns shifted towards weekdays during the pandemic . We wanted to see how those trends apply here in El Paso, and how they might vary throughout the city. Specifically, we were interested in which neighborhoods people spend more money on weekends compared to weekdays, and vice versa. We also wanted to understand how these patterns vary by industry, so we took the total amount spent on weekends in each neighborhood and compared that to how much was spent on weekdays, and we did that comparison separately for different industries. Below you can see in which neighborhoods people spend more or less on weekends than weekdays, depending on the type of spending. Keep in mind that the amount spent for each neighborhood is based on where people spend, not where they live. (Note: neighborhoods that are unshaded approximate to zero spending in that category.)

In most neighborhoods in El Paso, retail spending is lower on weekends than on weekdays. One possible explanation for this is that on average, people do more of their retail shopping on weekdays, regardless of where they go. Another possibility is that the concentration of spending shifts between weekdays and weekends, so that more people from all over the city go to the same places to shop on weekends, but on weekdays they shop closer to home. That could explain why the downtown area, the Fountains at Farah, and some of the neighborhoods around popular parks saw an increase in retail spending on weekends.

Not surprisingly, restaurant and bar spending is higher on weekends than weekdays in most areas. In the few neighborhoods where restaurant and bar traffic is higher on weekdays, this is likely due to those establishments being close to where a large number of people work, such as healthcare and education complexes. For example, in the neighborhoods where The Hospitals of Providence Transmountain and University Medical Center are located, people spend more money on restaurants and bars during the week than over the weekend. Downtown is another interesting case: in the blocks surrounding San Jacinto Plaza, people spend more at bars and restaurants on weekends than on weekdays, but

Similar to the retail spending map, many of the neighborhoods where people spend more on groceries during the weekends than the week are neighborhoods with large, popular grocery stores. Unlike retail spending however, there appears to be a balance in the number of neighborhoods with more spending on weekends and with less. Where do you grocery shop on weekdays and weekends?

Data on spending by merchant location is provided by Replica, a private mobility data company. Replica creates a synthetic population to estimate the amount spent on weekends and weekdays in each category, aggregated for each census tract. We imported the weekend and weekday datasets from October 2022 - October 2023 and calculated the total amount of spending across the time period, by each census tract and spending category. Then we found the percent difference between weekends and weekdays for each census tract and spending category. (We divided aggregate weekday spending by two and half to account for the fact that each week has five weekdays and two weekend days.)

 Check out the data for yourself .