People less likely to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day on the actual holiday: Report

St. Patrick’s Day is around the corner and bars, gutters and fists are all preparing for the bacchanalian overdrive everyone expects for March 17.

However, new data finds that revelers are less likely to get sloshed on the actual Catholic feast day, and are far more likely to wrestle with some Jameson and Guinness on the weekends bookending the holiday.

FirstData, the company behind the study, took a look at sales during the previous two holidays in restaurants and bars in New York City and Boston, perhaps the two most Irish places in the world outside Ireland itself.

What they found was that with St. Patrick’s Day falling on workdays the past two years (Monday in 2014 and Tuesday in 2015), restaurants saw more sales leading up to and following the holiday.

In “both years, the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day saw major spikes in spending across markets, peaking on Saturday (3/15 in 2014 and 3/14 in 2015 respectively) before taking a mid-week dip and experiencing an uptick on the weekend after the holiday,” according to FirstData.

With St Patrick’s Day falling on a Thursday this year, could this be when the trend is bucked? If the logic of the data follows, restaurants should be seeing more revelers leading up to and following the holiday.

Matt Lee is a web producer for Metro New York. He writes about almost everything and anything. Talk to him (or yell at him) on Twitter so he doesn’t feel lonely:@off_Yellow.