Expense Account Dining: More McDonald's Than 'Mad Men'
The 15 Most Popular Restaurants for Business Travelers
Road warriors know that business travel can be far from glamorous — a seemingly endless series of meetings broken up by long stretches behind the wheel or in cramped airplane seats. And despite the occasional great meal, expense account dining isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, either.
That’s made clear by a new quarterly report from Certify, which provides software for companies and employees to manage their expenses. The company used millions of receipts and vendor ratings from business people to compile rankings of the most commonly expensed restaurants and those with the highest ratings.
Unsurprisingly, Starbucks was the most commonly expensed restaurant, accounting for 4.7 percent of receipts submitted for reimbursement. McDonald’s and Subway were next on the list, with the burger chain the most common choice for dinners and the sandwich chain the top pick for lunches. Fast food chain Chick-fil-A received the top rating among restaurants, with a 4.5 average on a scale from 1 to 5. The days of the three Martini lunch are clearly long gone.
Related: 9 Ways McDonald’s Wants to Get You Excited About Its Food Again
Certify also reported that business travelers continue to increasingly choose Uber and Airbnb over taxis and hotels. Airbnb grew 143 percent in receipts in the second quarter of the year, though it remains far behind hotels like Marriott and Hampton Inn in popularity. Rental cars still dominated the group transportation receipts (45 percent), but Uber made up 31 percent of receipts, an increase of 8 percentage points from this time last year. For the first time ever, Uber was more popular than taxis, which made up 24 percent of receipts.
Coming Soon: Deductible Relief Day!
You may be familiar with the concept of Tax Freedom Day – the date on which you have earned enough to pay all of your taxes for the year. Focusing on a different kind of financial burden, analysts at the Kaiser Family Foundation have created Deductible Relief Day – the date on which people in employer-sponsored insurance plans have spent enough on health care to meet the average annual deductible.
Average deductibles have more than tripled over the last decade, forcing people to spend more out of pocket each year. As a result, Deductible Relief Day is “getting later and later in the year,” Kaiser’s Larry Levitt said in a tweet Thursday.
Chart of the Day: Families Still Struggling
Ten years into what will soon be the longest economic expansion in U.S. history, 40% of families say they are still struggling, according to a new report from the Urban Institute. “Nearly 4 in 10 nonelderly adults reported that in 2018, their families experienced material hardship—defined as trouble paying or being unable to pay for housing, utilities, food, or medical care at some point during the year—which was not significantly different from the share reporting these difficulties for the previous year,” the report says. “Among adults in families with incomes below twice the federal poverty level (FPL), over 60 percent reported at least one type of material hardship in 2018.”
Chart of the Day: Pragmatism on a Public Option
A recent Morning Consult poll 3,073 U.S. adults who say they support Medicare for All shows that they are just as likely to back a public option that would allow Americans to buy into Medicare or Medicaid without eliminating private health insurance. “The data suggests that, in spite of the fervor for expanding health coverage, a majority of Medicare for All supporters, like all Americans, are leaning into their pragmatism in response to the current political climate — one which has left many skeptical that Capitol Hill can jolt into action on an ambitious proposal like Medicare for All quickly enough to wrangle the soaring costs of health care,” Morning Consult said.
Chart of the Day: The Explosive Growth of the EITC
The Earned Income Tax Credit, a refundable tax credit for low- to moderate-income workers, was established in 1975, with nominal claims of about $1.2 billion ($5.6 billion in 2016 dollars) in its first year. According to the Tax Policy Center, by 2016 “the total was $66.7 billion, almost 12 times larger in real terms.”
Chart of the Day: The Big Picture on Health Care Costs
“The health care services that rack up the highest out-of-pocket costs for patients aren't the same ones that cost the most to the health care system overall,” says Axios’s Caitlin Owens. That may distort our view of how the system works and how best to fix it. For example, Americans spend more out-of-pocket on dental services ($53 billion) than they do on hospital care ($34 billion), but the latter is a much larger part of national health care spending as a whole.
