E‑Commerce and Spatial Rebalancing of the Catering Industry in Zhuhai, China: a Pre‑ and Post‑Pandemic Comparison

Abstract The rise of e-commerce and the gig economy, accelerated by COVID-19, has rapidly expanded online-to-offline (O2O) takeaway services and reshaped the spatial distribution of the catering industry in Chinese cities. To examine this process in China, we first analyzed the spatial evolution of the catering industry in Zhuhai before (2019) and after (2023) the pandemic using a hotspot detection model, with particular attention to differences between traditional restaurants and those adopting O2O takeaway services. We find that the traditional core–periphery spatial structure of the catering sector has been disrupted and has evolved into a more non-hierarchical pattern. O2O takeaway restaurants are more diffusely distributed and contribute to the decline of traditional restaurants, a transformation that has been further accelerated by the pandemic. Further analysis using random forest and multi-level geographically weighted regression models suggests that this transformation is primarily driven by behavioral changes among a growing segment of younger, better-educated, digitally proficient, higher-income, and time-constrained consumers, which aligns with the innovation diffusion hypothesis.