How Fast Food Is Getting Faster

Chick-fil-A’s new location in New York City has everything you’d expect from the chicken shop: friendly servers, crispy waffle fries and a line of hungry customers. It’s missing just one thing: seats.

The shop, which opened on the Upper East Side in March, is the chain’s first to exclusively handle pickup and delivery orders. It’s part of a trend of smaller, takeout-focused stores that boomed during the pandemic and stayed popular, especially among Manhattan’s coffee-shop and fast-food chains.

From 2019 to 2023, the average size of a retail lease in Manhattan shrank 17 percent, to 2,585 square feet, according to the CoStar Group, a commercial real estate data company.

That decline has been most visible in coffee shops, where Manhattanites have been left with fewer places to sit, said Gregory Zamfotis, the founder and chief executive of Gregorys Coffee.

“In many locations, because of turnover or pivots other businesses have made in reducing seating, there’s just less options for folks to be able to have somewhere to stay,” Mr. Zamfotis said.

It’s difficult to pin down exactly how much smaller cafes and fast-food restaurants have become. Many commercial real estate brokerages, such as CBRE and Cushman & Wakefield, track only a handful of small leases signed by these tenants each year. But real estate analysts, brokers and tenants all agreed that retailers are slimming down.