From some source or another SOTI:
It’s been a rocky year for the restaurant industry, with rising costs due to inflation and changing consumer habits driving a slew of chains with household names into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. According to those who follow the industry, there is no definable silver lining ahead for an industry in deep trouble.
Have to agree with this, because it’s a well-known fact that once food prices go up, they never come down again.
Last Sunday New Wife and I took a little trip to Sherman TX (a.k.a. the last exit off the highway before you get to Oklahoma) for a little antique / bargain shopping. (I know, I know; to most men, “antiquing” is just another term for “strap the rat cage to my face”, but I don’t mind it because New Wife and I have very similar tastes when it comes to shopping, and she is a fanatical scrimper when it comes to this kind of thing.)
Anyway: Sherman is not in the middle of nowhere, but you can certainly see Nowhere from the town square. One would expect a small town to have small-town prices, and indeed, the wares are the antique mall were very reasonable. (Not that we bought anything, but still.)
On the other hand, it was when we went out for lunch that the shock hit home.
You see, I’m in charge of the grocery shopping chez du Toit, so I’m accustomed to the price increases in food — I’ve ranted about it often enough on these pages — and I’ll be honest and say that we haven’t eaten “out” in about four months, other than the occasional takeout order of fries from Sonic and the like.
So we treated ourselves to a small BBQ lunch at the Cackle & Oink [sic], a nice little place just north of town. Modest premises, hometown feel, lots of locals inside… you know the drill.
And two small meals with iced tea came to over $50.
I nearly passed out.
Look, BBQ has always been kinda spendy, I know. But in the past, a small order of ribs and brisket (our normal fare) seldom ran over $30, or maybe a tad over with the tip. But $50???
Somebody told me the other day that two burgers at Five Guys now costs in the region of $40, and I couldn’t believe them. Now, I do.
It just means that we’ll be eating at home in the future, and if my prognosis about food prices is indeed true, we’ll never be eating out again. What a lovely prospect (and just when we were beginning to claw ourselves out of our recent abject poverty, too).
And for restaurants, the prospects will be similarly gloomy, you betcha.
I don’t know what could possibly avert this situation. Maybe a Trump election would help, in that some sanity will be restored and inflation tamed, but somehow I doubt it.
Food’s gone up over here too.
We gave up on dining out a few years ago for exactly this reason. Even a rather modest dinner for two adults and three kids at a local mom and pop type restaurant was over $100. It isn’t that it’s unaffordable, in the grand scheme of things an extra $100 every few weeks isn’t going to change our financial universe, it’s that it is offensive. Ditto for even cheap roadtrip food like McDonald’s. Easily $60 for a (disgusting) lunch. And if they don’t lower prices, well, I guess I’ll keep cooking at home and brown bagging lunch. No great loss; home cooked is much healthier, anyway.
Until recently we hadn’t eaten out for about 5 years. 2 months ago we ate lunch at a Red Robins in Bloomington IN as we’d never been there. With tip, 2 burgers, fries, tea, cost about $40 and the worst part was how bland the food was.
No, actually, the worst part was the loud and obnoxious group that was seated in the next booth about 10 mins before we left. How in the world do people act this way? These weren’t young people. They were in their 50’s and 60’s, about 8 of them. At one point one of them, a woman, started coughing up a storm and it became more than we could bear. I threw 2 20’s on the table and we fled. We’ll never go back.
I won’t go into the 2nd place ordeal but it was a similar place like Kim detailed and again, the food was bland and expensive. Nevr again.
I handle all the food everything in our house and even my fastest, most basic food prep is much more flavorful, less expensive, and more rewarding all the way around. Eating out now is a huge step backward and I doubt we’ll be doing much of it going forward.
People, in general, have turned into uncouth and uncaring assholes, with disgustingly obese body’s and loud slovenly mouths and I have little tolerance for any of it.
My brother and I have noted the McD’s and BK now cost as much as the local cafes, so where I used to do a “drive thru” when I was in a hurry for lunch, now I’ll just the cafe ahead and get the meal to-go. It’s the same price and a lot better tasting. Also I’m supporting the local business.
Steve:
In our TinyTown™ here in NW Wyoming we used to have both a BK and a McD’s, but the BK succumbed to the aftereffects of Covidiocy and Bidenomics, and shuttered itself a couple of years ago. My wife and I used to occasionally (every three months or so) go to McD’s for a quickie breakfast, but just getting a couple of hand-meals (sausage muffin with egg and a hash brown) now runs so much money we haven’t been there for the past handful of years.
I haven’t bothered getting lunch at McD’s since they stopped putting beef tallow flavor on their fries, which was the only decent thing about eating there. As with you, as their prices have spiraled completely out of control, we now save our money until we can afford a lunch at one of the restaurants in town. For about the same price we can get a rare-cooked bison burger hot offf the grill with actual potato french fries, and the best part is I can wash it down with a (yes, pricey) draft beer from a local brewery. We also generally tip about 20% there since the service is friendly, fast, and courteous.
Of course, since it’s a tourist town, we don’t go there during “the season”, which runs from late May to mid-September. If we need fast food or something we don’t cook ourselves, it’s frozen stuff.
Not too long ago I started using quicken to track my accounts. Never really did much with it other than make sure it was categorizing expenses properly. I really haven’t been diligent about tracking expenses, since I have no one but myself to spend on, and I’m still employed.
But last week I was farting around with it and did a quick look at ‘eating out’ or restaurant expenses (which include uber eats). It was an eye popping number for the month. That said, I don’t eat a lot of fast food.
For instance, I’ll order Chinese, usually an entre, egg rolls, and maybe dumplings. That’s nearly $50. I used to get few meals out of it. But lately I noticed that it’s more veggie than meat.
That money could be better used elsewhere, like range fees and ammo.
Time to reel it back.
I will say that Country Burger in Plano is a pretty good deal. You can score a great burger/fries/drink and be outta there for around $15-17 or so. Go for lunch and you won’t be eating the rest of the day.
There’s a comedian who put out a short sketch about how ridiculous takeout and delivery fees are over 2 years ago. The $10 sandwich becomes $75.81, and when it’s all broken out with varfious fees, taxes, etc, suddenly it bumps up even higher becuz it’s tough times! Quite amusing, and sadly, not nearly as ridiculous as he was going for — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Zd4GrA7fpc
Highest ranked comment: “I love food delivery apps. Every time I can’t decide what to do for dinner, I go onto one of them, find something I really want, get to the checkout page where they tell me what the total’s going to be after all the fees, and then say “eh, I’ll just get something out of the fridge.” Saves me a ton of money on eating out.”
One thing I mentioned above was frozen stuff…we keep a fair selection in the garage freezer just for when we feel too lazy to actually cook something.
The increase in variety and improvement in quality of frozen foods has been quite remarkable in the past dozen years. If you choose carefully you can find quality foods that rival mid-price restaurants in flavor. Italian food seems to be quite easily frozen, and there are some eggplant parmesan entree’s out there that are better than what you’ll find at many restaurants. Thai food, Indian, Cajun, there’s an incredible variety to choose from. Here in TinyTown™ there’s a very limited number of restaurants, and the frozen section of our local grocery store, even though relatively small when compared to a city store, still has a huge range of cuisines from which to choose. Even the nearest WallyWorld (aka Walmart) has a decent selection of frozen stuff at very low prices.
It’s one of the reasons we don’t eat out nearly as much as we did when we lived in the Heart of the Hive™ of SW Minneapolis.
The other thing is that we’re now continuously hitting the sale items at our local store. We just found a few bone-in beef rib roasts on sale (expiration date of today) for $7.99/pound. Froze one, and roasted the other. A five-pound roast was 40 bucks, but we get 3 good meals for the two of us from it, which works out to under $7/meal for us. Together with a potato or some rice and bulk salad greens for dinner and you’re still under ten bucks for an all-you-can eat prime rib supper. I don’t know of anywhere you can approach that, eating out, for less than triple the cost of doing it at home; at the restaurants around here a prime rib dinner will run $40 to $50.
My weakness is Whataburger. Being retired now, I don’t get out to one very often anymore, but when I do, it’s pretty much the same order. what used to cost about $10 (just for me) back in the “happy times” when I was bringing in a regular paycheck, now costs $15-18+ for the same stuff. It’s nor Donald’s, or Jack, It’s Whataburger. I expect to pay more, because it’s what I want. Sadly, the quality of the products universally has gone down. The service everywhere is horrible, no matter where you stop. Management doesn’t want to hear it, and if you do make the effort to keep from going for their throat when they screw up your order (I actually have received a meatless burger on two occasions. No joke.) they just shrug it off and mumble something about not being able to hire enough people or get them to show up for their shifts.
You need to make friends with a rancher or property owner and start shooting some deer. At least you will have a ton of biltong laid in, can make jerky, grind or grill the best cuts. This year we will be shooting hopefully 3 and if I get my crossbow up and running maybe more.
Local breakfast joint – pre-commies – breakfast including 2 eggs bacon, toast grits, soda about $ ~7.00 including tip. Same thing now $15.00+tip – which drives breakfast to damn near $20.00.
Wife and I used to splurge once in awhile and eat at Saltgrass steak house. I’m a sucker for a good prime rib. Last time I looked (at least a year ago) a prime rib dinner was $45, and only two of their restaurants in the DFW even offered it. Never mind. We have a Weber gas BBQ. We do some of our grocery shopping at Tom Thumb. Their prime sirloin is some of the best beef around (when on sale). Prime is the highest grade of beef, one above Choice. Tom Thumb’s digital coupons are well worth signing up for. You get coupons in the app tailored for you in addition to the ones on the shelf.
Our eat out place now is Spring Creek BBQ. Again, worth signing up. We receive periodic BOGO deals for rib dinners, deals good for about a week. May is our month. We each get two free dinners that month, one for our birthday and one for our sign-up anniversary.
Breakfast at Waffle House has doubled in the past 4 years. I took the wife to our condo in St. Augustine a few weeks back. I needed to touch up the paint and replace a chair to keep it in the top rental group. I have had the place for 30 years and I know the St. Augustine area well enough to know where the locals eat. We do not do fast food. for lunch it was $50 to $60 and dinner bumped that another $15 to $20. A mixed drink or shot of whiskey was $9 to $12. There are 17.5 shots of whiskey in a $24 fifth of whiskey so that works to just over a 700% markup.
What bugs me about Waffle House is that their menu choices have halved, and the quality of the food — never that good — seems to have slipped. The last time I ate there (because nowhere else was open) I vowed never to eat there again.
And WH used to be my favorite brekkie place in the US.
Kim, you need to come up to Lancaster County, PA. There’s a place near me does AWESOME breakfast (it’s the second place I mention below). Best French Toast you’ll ever have in your life! Only downside is they don’t do pancakes.
You think food is expensive now, wait until Kammy imposes price controls.
Not only will it be expensive, it will also be un-obtainable.
I’ve been to Cackle and Oink (business trip to Denison). It’s decent but not great.
BTW, Cackle and Oink would be a good nickname for Harris and Walz.
best I’ve heard all year
I don’t have a good nickname for Timpon but I heard some people use ¡Que Mala! for the VP – it fits…
I patronize the local Five Guys more often than I should. It’s gotten ridiculously expensive (darn near $10 for a single-patty cheeseburger!) and service is often slow because the place is woefully understaffed. But its in the same shopping complex as the grocery stores I shop at, so when I inevitably miss lunch while running my weekly errands, I’ll stop there and grab a burger so my blood sugar doesn’t get completely out of whack.
There are two local establishments that I try to patronize at least once per month. They’re both local, independent restaurants. One’s fairly close, serves mostly diner fare. The food is good, nothing to write home about, but the prices are decent and the service is good. The other is a bit out of my way, but holy carp is it worth it. Food is AMAZING and the prices are very reasonable given the quality. Stumbled across it totally by accident when I was looking to move to the area and have been a regular ever since.
But like I said, those places are a once-per-month treat at the most. Their prices are reasonable, but that’s a relative metric when everything has gotten stupid expensive.
I think bitching about the cost of fast food is misguided. Your cost to insure your car to drive to the fast food place has probably tripled – much more than the cost of a burger and fries. Priorities!
And don’t forget the $3.50 each way for gas.
EVERYTHING has tripled in price – at minimum! – over the past four years.
But hey, no more mean tweets. So we got that going for us.
A good rule of thumb for restaurants is that the meal is about 6 times the cost of the ingredients.
More for high-end places.
A NY Strip that costs about $8 is going to set the diner back about $32 or more for the finished meal.
Covers utilities, payroll, taxes, etc…
sorry, but my math must be off
besides which, most dining establishments I’ve worked at many moons ago used to make their vig at the bar
Whoops – make that $48
And yes, most restaurants make their profit from alcohol sales.
we get take out when the missus doesn’t feel like cooking and we eat out from time to time. It has certainly become far more expensive. We try to avoid getting takeout or eating out more than once or twice a week and soon that will be reduced further.
The prices at the market have gone up due to increased fuel costs that affects farmers and transportation and eventually the consumer as well.
Russia does not have the insane inflation rates that the US does. My Russian language tutor asked why I wanted to emigrate, still believing in Hollywood America.
I sent her a picture of a $20 ( 1800 Ruble ) receipt, and the small bag of groceries I got for it. That amount would have bought 3 full bags in Russia. Rent and home prices in Moskva are about half of, say, Denver.
A fry cook in Moskva can afford a one room apartment in the outer ring, none of this room mate crap.