Most major chains already have apps, at least I Know McDonalds and Burger King both do. The McD's app does have online ordering too, and you can pick it up at the restaurant. Less chance of confusion when dealing with a screen or mobile device if you don't have a standardish order.
You can get many of their sandwiches for $1 using the mobile checkout coupon, including the Fish Filet and Big Mac. I've been using it pretty regularly recently.
One of the main draws of the mobile apps are the discount coupons. At McDonalds you can get many of their sandwiches for $1 using the mobile checkout coupon, including the Fish Filet and Big Mac. I've been using it pretty regularly recently to get a single sandwich, no side, for lunch. Burger King has similar deals, but they are usually oriented around getting two adult meals for $6, etc.
Another interesting application of blockchains could be to the yelp/foursquare/tripadvisor/opentable/dining-rewards/loyality space. One protocol to handle menus, reviews, and reward points, instead of a separate incompatible reward app and shitty non mobile website for each damn restaurant. Another, and different component of trust in this ecosystem would be verification of authenticity vs spam.
I don't know that I've seen one of these blockchain ideas that doesn't boil down to "wouldn't it be great if <complicated industry> all used the same database/protocol/interface/ for <complicated process>"
On one hand: of course, yes, that would be awesome! On the other, the coordination problem vastly overwhelms the technical problem i.e. getting a large group of competitive companies aligned around a single standard is impossible, insert link to xkcd 'competing standards' comic here, etc. I get that blockchain 'solves the trust problem' but the problem of distrust between those competitive actors is not related to former.
OTOOH: if the hype around blockchain is what we need to get those gaggles of competitors aligned around something...
the world standardized around http/smtp. I dont think a standardized restaurant-menu-trust-loyality-payment chain is impossible. Look how long it took email to take off (and then got replaced by facebook.)
Its much more likely for a yelp/foursquare to gobble up the market, but I'd prefer a decentralized protocol for distributing menus...
And to criticize your criticism, standard menu metadata + loyality + reviews is not a complicated process, its just not an angle thats really been attacked before. I dont know of a menu database that is intended to feed third party clients like yelp/foursquare/allmenus. All the menu hosts want to be the end user client. My idea is more about separating the database from the client, and sharing a database between a couple companies. For something like this to happen, all you would need is yelp and foursquare (tripadvisor, opentable, zagat, urbanspoon, zomato) to create a consortium and invite a couple other big players. Its not about the restaurants self organizing.
Surprisingly there's no discussion of food quality as a factor. In the race to keep portions huge and prices low the quality of food served at most chain restaurants has declined to the point that it's unpalatable for many. But for whatever reason businesses refuse to acknowledge this fact.
Thing is if I'm eating at a fast-food restaurant, I'm not that bothered by food quality. In-n-Out doesn't have anywhere close to the same burger quality I could get at other joints, but it's cheap and relatively good for the cost. I can't even make the same claim with McDonald's or other major fast-food chains outside of maybe, Jolibee's which has very delicious fried chicken for a fast food chain.
This is something that always strikes me as very odd when visiting the US. The portions are just So.Frigging.Huge, to the point it becomes outright comical. If I order a 'small' pizza in the US, I get something way bigger than the 'normal' pizza I would get at home, which I already are barely able to finish. I'm almost never able to finish my plate, not just because I cannot eat more, but mostly because I simply don't want to eat more of the same: in most cases the food is bland, and I quickly have had enough of it. I'm not saying the food is 'bad', I also like to eat fast food now and then, just that it simply doesn't warrant eating more of it than absolutely necessary. Typical quantity over quality.
At the same time, when I go out for dinner at home, the best restaurant experiences are always when I feel 'almost full' when my plate is completely empty, and still have some room left for dessert. Nothing needs to go to waste, and I don't need to take doggy-bags home so I can eat more of the same bland (and now re-heated, soggy) food the next day, as is common in the US (doggy bags are an extremely rare sight where I live). The 'dining out' experience could hardly be any more different comparing the US to the restaurants at home. To make things worse, prices are also way higher in the US, at least the more urban areas in the east and west.
I remember one time staying in an AirBNB in the US, talking to the host who used to own a classic american diner. She had the exact same thoughts about food quality and portion sizes as we did, and told us she actually tried to do it different in her diner. Customers would by default get a small plate of food, but could order more for free if it wasn't enough. For some bizarre reason her customers hated it and kept complaining about the portion size. So she switched back, and almost no-one ever finished their food completely again.
Very quaint obsession with quantity, if you ask me.
Yes!!! You would be surprised what things you can negotiate in stores and restaurants. You need only ask. In restaurants you can even substitute unhealthy items for healthier items in your meal in many cases. Many local restaurants I go to even have items you can order that are not listed on the menu.
I've not seen this in many places, actually. I also don't think it would really work for me, as I would never be able to guess whether a half-portion wouldn't be less than I wanted to eat.
It would be so much easier if it was just what I'm used to here: if you just order food, you'll get enough for a 'normal' eater. You can always go bigger or smaller, depending on if you are a 'big eater' or not. The default in the US seems to be that the size of the standard order needs to satisfy a giant construction worker who hasn't eaten for two days.
I remember ordering blueberry pancakes for breakfast once, and got a pile a that was almost a foot high. Even though the pancakes were actually pretty good, I think I finished less then 1/4th of them. That just makes no sense.
The food is the smaller part of the cost - think about the brick-and-mortar, the employees waiting for us to come in and order, the insurance etc. A little flour and canned blueberries is peanuts. So by offering 'too much food' there's a perceived value by some
Well yes of course, I understand the psychological tricks restaurants use to increase 'perceived value'. That doesn't mean I agree with them though, or that it makes the food any better. Maybe I'm atypical, but for me it actually decreases the value, because I know I will feel stuffed before my plate is empty, and my last memory of eating the food will be that I could hardly stomach any more of it before I stopped eating. This is not even considering the moral objections I have against throwing away perfectly good food, as someone else above me already mentioned as well.
My local pancake house will sometimes have 'all you can eat' which means a modest serving with the option to order additional food at the same cost. Of course I never need any more, and that way no waste! And the same perceived value or better. Probably a much better solution.
You can also ask for the meal to be split between yourself and your dining partner. Unfortunately, the few times my wife and I tried this, they split the main food (burger, steak, chicken, etc) but then the doubled up on all the starchy sides (fries, rice, pasta) so it doesn't really benefit the individual too much.
I love finding restaurants that serve food in 'normal' portion sizes (normal being enough for a hungry single human being). I dunno about other posters here, but I was raised by parents who predated the current obesity epidemic and whose own parents went through the Great Depression and 'clean your plate' and 'children are starving in Africa' were common refrains.
I feel a great need to finish what I am served, and is has been a hard fought battle to not do that when the portion sizes are as ridiculously oversized as they can be in America.
Eating with my spouse helps, as we can always split plates, but still. Vastly prefer smaller portion sizes.
Back when I was having trouble with overeating at restaurants due to a similar "clean your plate" mentality, I got in the habit of just packing a Tupperware with me. When the food came, I'd pack up half of it and stick it under my chair before I started eating.
A bit gauche, I realize, but better that than overeating. Rather striking to have such a concrete illustration that restaurants were giving me fully twice as much food as I really needed to be eating, too.
There's few memories I have so vividly of my childhood.
The one that sticks out most is the emotional abuse I'd received from friends parent's when I couldn't finish my entire plate (but still ate a little bit of everything).
My view as a (6 ft 0 inch tall, 170 pound [182 cm, 77 kg], slightly athletic, frugal) American:
If I order an entree at a restaurant, I want that meal to be my biggest meal of the day, with rare exception. A meal at a restaurant is a special occasion, and should be a source of hospitality. The prime way for the restaurant to provide this hospitality is to accomodate my hunger! If I am still hungry at all after ordering and finishing an entree, then I am not satisfied.
I'm totally fine with eating a bunch of cheap filler sides (fries, rice, etc) to make me full. Often times, I feel like more expensive restaurants do a worse job at actually filling you up with the entree, because they want to tack on appetizers, small plates, etc. I leave these sorts of restaurants angry sometimes. Just give me food, dang it!
To reply to your thoughts, I always had read that restaurants and food in general were cheaper in the U.S. Curious that you found the opposite to be true.
This is the usual perspective I heear from fellow Americans, but I can't agree with it. What ever happened to a satisfying experience that didn't involve stuffing oneself?
He never said anything about "stuffing himself". He said he shouldn't leave the restaurant hungry. I don't see how this can be a controversial preference.
Probably because satiety isn't a constant thing...our bodies adapt. As an American, whenever I spend time in Europe or Asia, I spend the first week feeling hungry. But after that, I adapt and I'm fine. And when I get back to the States, I spend the next month making two meals out of every restaurant portion I buy until my body eventually adapts back.
In America, we stuff ourselves without realizing we're doing so.
Most of those types of restaurants are just feeding you cheap, deep fried, slop. If I got to a special occasion restaurant invariably the meals will be small. I'm usually paying for the location, the reputation of the chef and their team, and the presentation of the food. If I wanted deep fried filler I have a skillet and freezer full of that at home.
As an expat dining in the US is stupidly expensive. I've had 3-course lunches at french restaurants that didn't cost more than $20. I consider myself lucky if I can eke $30/pp at the local wingery after food, drinks, taxes, and gratuity.
>> To reply to your thoughts, I always had read that restaurants and food in general were cheaper in the U.S. Curious that you found the opposite to be true.
If you compare the same quality food, it is way more expensive in the US. I can get a very decent 3-course meal here (Netherlands) for $20, maybe $30 if you include drinks (wine, beer). To get the same quality food in CA (and I've visited many, many places there) I would have to spend at least $50 without drinks, without tips.
Of course I can get food for $20 or $30 in CA at every corner of the street as well, but the quality will be way below what I expect for that money. The difference in perspective is probably that in the US there seem to be 9 low-end places for every decend mid-range restaurant, while here it's more like 50-50. Not trying to be a snob here, that's just my perception.
At the high-end it's way worse even, by the way. For $100 I can get a royal 6-course high-cuisine meal with accompanying wines for every course here, even at some restaurants rated with a Michelin star. I've been to places in e.g. Palo Alto, which were pretty good, but nowhere near the level of even a single michelin star, and the bill would approach $200 per person after including drinks and tips. Portion size was not a problem in these cases, by the way ;-)
I assume by CA you mean SV. It's wildly inappropriate to generalize SV experiences to the US as a whole. It's about as applicable to the reality most people live in as Floridaman stories.
Not just SV, I've been all around the pacific coast, but also inland (Central Valley, San Bernadino, etc). You won't find a lot more than Denny's, KFC and McDonalds there anyway ;-)
it's just harder to find the good, cheaper places in california because they don't have the budget to advertise like the expensive places (by that i mean acquiring "free" press from local food critics, newspapers, and the like, not just literally paying yelp).
also, good western european(?) food (spanish/french/italian/etc) is more expensive than, say, good asian or latin american food. the plating of food into courses will bias you toward those more expensive restaurants, by the way. my favorite restaurants are typically single plate/bowl by design, which you can then share family-style by ordering a few items.
i'd also echo the point that good food costs way more in northern california than in southern california. socal just has many more cheaper, good restaurants to choose from.
Interesting note on that, the usage of “entree” has shifted over the past 100 years; the American meaning ‘main course’ is in line with the 19th century French definition.
What about the French usage? The French use of the word entrée in Escoffier's 1921 Le Guide Culinaire was still the traditional one ('made' hot meat dishes served in the classic sequence before a roast). Escoffier classifies as entrées almost any dish that we would now consider a main course: steaks (entrecotes or filet de boeuf, tournedos), cassoulet, lamb or veal cutlets, ham, sausage, braised leg of lamb (gigot), stews or sautes of chicken, pigeon or turkey, braised goose, foie gras. Escoffier has over 500 pages of entrée recipes. Only roast fowl, and small game animals are classified as roasts, in a small 14 page roast section.
In US urban areas, rent is a dominant cost, so low end/casual restaurants are trying to keep purchases in the $10-15 range. A Chipotle in a business district may only be able to handle a fixed number of customers, so its difficult if people purchase items a la carte. The 'solution' is to provide larger portions than the average customer wants even though there's diminishing returns. At the low end burger restaurants struggle when people are purchasing off of 'value menus.'
What you said doesn't make any sense to me at all. You seem to be drawing conclusions and making assertions by conflating low end casual dining with fast good.
You state that it's difficult for a fast food restaurant to manage a la carte purchases when that's exactly what they are designed to do. Their entire business model is based around an a la carte menu.
You then justify larger portions as a means to mitigate customers ordering additional portions. The reality is that for most casual or low end dining the customer knows what to expect and orders appropriately. At best your assertion about large portions would only work to satisfy first time customers.
A core problem is a customer thinking that serving size and price should be proportional. Most of the real costs are independent of portion size, i.e. real estate, capital, and labor. The raw ingredients in restaurant food just aren't that much of the total cost. The rest of the differences between fast food or fine dining come down to the quest to find local maxima in this problem space.
Fast food can bring the total cost closer to the raw ingredients by increasing the utilization of real estate, capital, and labor. A fine dining restaurant needs to dedicate much more real estate and staff to each customer, since they cannot serve as many customers in one time period. At the same time, they probably need at least some higher cost ingredients to satisfy the different expectations of a customer willing to pay higher prices.
A "small" pizza in the US is for two or three people. If you are alone you need to order a "personal pan" pizza.
I don't know if it is still a thing, but last time I went to a TGI Fridays (a few years ago now) they had a menu option to make the portions smaller for a couple of bucks off. The caveat is that it didn't increase the quality of the food--and that's kind of a problem for a TGI Fridays.
Finally, if you're going to something that calls itself a diner, you normally aren't expecting fine dining. The expectation is a big old plate of greasy fried chow. There is an expectation mismatch that is going to generate a lot of complaints.
That said, I totally agree that way too many restaurants in the US subscribe to the "if we can't make it good, at least we can make it big" philosophy. There are certain establishments I won't even patronize because they're so ridiculous in this regard, like the Cheesecake Factory. "Here is your 4lb of spaghetti, but be sure to save room for the 2lb slice of cheesecake we are named for!"
We got a large pan pizza the other day and it was enough for five people, who each got two slices. To have one person tackle that would have been crazy.
Well, you can think of it as a double meal. Just get 1 meal and split it with the wife and kid. then the quantity is just about right. Only problem is, if you like different things, it won't work out.
One of the key metrics for US casual dining firms is the number of times that they can turn a table in a night. In the industry the metric is called table turns and is often talked about on quarterly conference calls with investors.
One thing that kills table turns are people who stay for dessert or coffee. On way to prevent that is to serve plates overloaded with cheap carb fillers (rice, fries, etc). People feel obligated to eat what is on the plate and when stuffed won’t linger.
Other tips are to use hard surfaces (floors, walls, ceilings) so that the acoustics make it hard to talk; move tables to the center of the room; have waiters show up with check-in-hand when they ask about desserts; drop the check early; keep the restaurant too cold (too hot, men complain, too cold women leave); and put TVs on the walls (kills conversations).
I noticed this much more in Canada than I did in New York. I would absent absentmindedly order a large (heck, I'm on holiday) and be faced with more food than I could possibly eat.
I suspect the less cosmopolitan areas of the US are very similar though.
The article was focusing on fast food. Fast food franchisers work very hard to make the product consistent from restaurant to restaurant and year to year. Fast food customers often don't want surprises or new experiences with their trips to those restaurants.
If I order a Big Mac in New York it pretty much is the same as one in Omaha and is pretty much the same as it was 20 years ago. Necessary changes that are made are deliberately small and the quality is basically the same over time in my experience.
I don't think they are mutually exclusive, but I often see quality and price advertised separately. Fast food (McDonalds, Wendy's, KFC, etc) advertises heavily on price, perhaps because their demographic is more price-sensitive (or has stricter economic constraints). A fast food/fast casual restaurant that advertises more on quality (Chipotle, Cava, Panera, etc) is going after a different demographic that is probably more selective about food than immediately price sensitive.
This is purely observational based on looking at fast food restaurants in the city and suburbs. It would be interesting to see how it varies across regions.
I'd say that Wendy's is closer to Chipotle than McDonalds. They are a fair bit more expensive and heavily advertise their food quality (fresh, never frozen).
That's an interesting observation, because I've perceived the opposite trend. I eat very differently from a typical American (for one, never been big on rich, greasy food), so, 20 years ago, very few fast food chains offered anything I'd have eaten. Since then many of them have started offering fresher foods that are moving in the direction of how I like to eat. But they're just not moving as fast as my eating habits are changing.
I'm not even certain if they should try to keep up. Sure, they can offer me hummus and crudites for a light lunch when I'm on the road. But grocery stores already have that covered, and at a price point that's probably much lower than McDonald's could manage. And they can offer me beans, rice and fixins, but Qdoba will already sell me two meals' worth of that for less than twice the cost of a single meal at McDonald's, so again, there just isn't a lot of gold for them in them thar hills.
I agree with you in a way. I think the rise of the new chains you describe is a result of the gradual decline of the old guard of fast food. And if you look at those new chains today vs when they opened you see a decline in quality as well.
In the late 90s everything at Subway was prepared fresh in store and the meat was single origin. Today everything comes in bags and the "meat" is lower in quality than the crappiest of hot dog.
Chipotle went from fresh in 2001 to unsanitary burrito factory in 2017. They're being followed down the hole cloesly by Moe's and a bit further back by Willy's.
Starbucks went from a high end coffee house in the 90s to a candy store.
Dunkin Donuts in the 90s made fresh donuts nightly in store, today they have them shipped in from factory and aren't any better than grocery store bakery donuts, just more varied.
Perhaps that's the natural order of most fast food as they chase margins. Death by a thousand compromises.
The graph showing restaurant cost inflation trumping grocery cost inflation over the last couple years is surprising to me. There's a big difference. Labor costs are a huge factor, I would guess.
I'm wondering if franchising has something to do with this. There are just so many fast food restaurants along the highways and dotted around the sprawl of big box stores that surround towns these days. And they seem to always be nearly empty.
My (wild) guess is that some of this is that the motherships are permitting overbuilding. They get their franchising fees regardless, and don't necessarily have a whole lot of reason to care if their franchisees are bringing in enough business to turn a healthy profit.
How many employees in the restaurant industry get health insurance? There are many millions of waiters, cooks, busboys, greeters, etc... that get paid minimum wage with no benefits.
"Peak restaurant" is in the peak boom years of 1999-2000 and 2007-8. What's interesting is that it hasn't recovered even though the economy nominally has. This lends credence to the "unequal recovery" theories, that although growth is up and unemployment appears to be down people don't actually have nearly as much spending money.
I could definitely see a "shrinking middle class" argument here— poor people are cooking at home and rich people are eating out at nice restaurants— fast food is set up to serve a demographic that's just not as prominent as it was 10-20 years ago.
I would suggest the middle class have figured out that fast food is bad - bad for your health, doesn't taste good, and is more expensive than cooking at home. Thus they are cooking at home even if they could afford to eat out.
Doesn't taste good? That's a matter of opinion. I love fast food.
It's not necessarily more expensive than home cooking. A value menu cheeseburger at McDonald's is $1[1]. First result on google[2] says ground beef, 100% beef, per lb. is $3.75. The McDonald's cheeseburger's patty has a weight of 1.6oz or .1lbs, which of the aforementioned ground beef would cost $0.375. Tomato is estimated at $0.08 cents per slice, buns at $0.41 per bun, and lettuce at $0.02 for a leaf[4]. The slice of cheese is estimated at $0.29[5].
.375 + .08 + .41 + .02 + .29 = 1.175. So the homemade burger costs more not even accounting for the opportunity cost of the time to make it, the fact that you're probably not going to use all those ingredients and eventually throw some of them out, gas/electric for the stove, and possible butter/vegetable oil.
Not that it isn't worth it to make homemade burgers - they're definitely better than McDonald's, especially if you get local grass fed beef, but I like the unique taste of fast food restaurants and the economies of scale work in their favor to make things cheap, sometimes cheaper than cooking it yourself.
And on health, I don't see how the McDonald's burger is any worse for you than a homecooked one. McDonald's one probably has less grease. Maybe beef quality, but I'm not sure quality of beef has a direct impact on healthiness.
I'm not sure it's fair to compare a very specific food item which enjoys massive economies of scale when prepared industrially the McDonald's hamburger is. Like, of course a homemade hamburger of that type is going to cost more and take a bunch of time— when I make hamburgers at home, I make them from scratch including baking my own buns, but the result is not a $1 McDonalds style burger, it's something that would be $20+ at a gastropub.
More realistic would be to compare the food value derived from a $1 McDonalds hamburger with what $1 can buy at a discount/bulk grocery store in dried beans, sweet potatoes, onions, and other high bang-for-buck items.
Typically the poor don’t cook at home, they subsist on very cheap junk food available at gas stations and similar. Cooking takes time, some skill, and access to raw ingredients. This is very hard if you’re overworked and live in a food desert.
>Typically the poor don’t cook at home, they subsist on very cheap junk food available at gas stations and similar
Typically they do. Poor people aren't idiots. They know that prepared store food is grossly overpriced compared to a similar meal they assemble themselves and seek to avoid it as much as possible without spending too much time/effort on meal prep. They usually manage to drag themselves to Walmart or the local supermarket every 1-2 weeks. Even if you have to drag your ass to some far away supermarket because it's the only one open after you get home from work and get 3hr of sleep that night you'll still do it because of the huge cost reduction compared to prepared food or whatever your local convenience store has. You'll buy the same bunch of things every time because over time you figure out a bunch of relatively low effort and low cost meals and then stick to them. Lunch or breakfast will probably be the same thing every day and you'll skip the other. They buy gas station sandwiches and junk food more than the rich because when your menu is the same boring things on a 2wk cycle so it's a nice, low mental effort, way to shake things up from time to time.
The home cooked meals poor people eat are just far less balanced than ideal because they're more skewed toward ease of prep and cost than what rich people eat. Instead of a salad they'll bring a PB&J and a few Oreos to work. Something like (microwave) baked potatoes and chicken nuggets, maybe with a vegetable side (or something similarly imbalanced but cheap) will probably be on the menu at least one night a week.
"Food deserts" are a problem but less of a problem than they seem to be because what rich people think poor people should be eating and what poor people think they should be eating are vastly different.
The food desert phenomenon really bugs me. But I do have hope the pendulum will swing back.
The whole paleo thing. What I jokingly call the "troglodiet". Beans, wild rice, big leafy greens. Much less meat, dairy, starchy carbs.
It's weird that cheaper is more healthy.
I really only need a pressure cooker, cutting board, knives, a few bowls, some storage. I've unloaded most everything else. I'm basically camping at home.
But I had to get more wealthy to even become aware of these options, choices.
I'd never stop having fast food no matter how rich I was. I've been to fancy restaurants - they're largely a scam. Once had some special aged $100 steak that didn't even taste as good as a $12 steak from the grocery store cooked by myself. Fast food chains have unique flavors to them that you just can't get anywhere else that I'll always want to go back to.
Also possible explanation: the quality of home-cooked meals and the ease of making them may have greatly increased since the '08 crisis.
Proposed mechanism: The Great Recession forced people to cook at home out of financial necessity. Home-chefs' skill and confidence increased (human capital). Rich-media internet video sites provided step-by-step visual instructions (lowered barriers to entry). People bought knives and slow cookers and avocado slicers (capital investment).
I sure wouldn't want to compete against that hypothetical!
...I wonder if there is any literature on this topic (would love a pointer!)
I worked as a chef in restaurants for over a decade: Why do you feel this way? It's food. If you eat it, you will be fed. Someone cooked that food for you. The quality of the product doesn't make something a "restaurant" instead of a restaurant. Many times it's not the best dining experience, but they clearly have a function in the "getting people meals" ecosystem.
TL;dr- slow clap for some top tier smug nonsense, but your point is extremely invalid and undermines the hard work millions of people are putting in every day at these establishments.
I think that's a little harsh - at least here in the UK the word restaurant conjures up an idea of a more expensive establishment, likely with tablecloths and wine involved, and possibly French. It's not difficult to see the humour in the juxtaposition of that image with the reality of McDonald's. I've nothing against McDonald's btw, and eat there from time to time.
I'm fine calling that guy smug, because that's an extremely smug thought.
Also, you do have an internalized bias against McDonald's and you just showed it. To you, a restaurant isn't "a place that serves food" but "a move expensive establishment..." That's not to say you're a bad person, just that you're shifting definitions from what something objectively is to what you think something should be.
Here in the US, restaurant workers across the board are not paid enough and there are massive labor issues tied to the industry. Fast food workers especially are treated abhorrently because "that's not even a real restaurant" or "that's a job for a kid to get out of high school".
I'll fully admit that my past influences my thoughts on the matter, but what I'm trying to do is say that this sort of behavior isn't cool, and remind people that these places are often franchises run by a guy employing people from your neighborhood.
McDonald's food is objectively of a lower quality than that of other restaurants. It's still a restaurant, no matter how dismissive people want to be.
Ok then, have it your way: next time you're going out on a date trying telling your date you are taking her to a restaurant, and then go to McDonald's. I suspect it might be a short date.
Some may have missed it, but the article casually mentions student loan debt as a driver of this change. Personally, I typically only eat out once a week to save money (and it's healthier).
If you peel back the curtain on a lot of ongoing changes in consumer preferences I think you'll find student loans are always a contributing factor to some degree - especially among younger generations.
And yet we aren't doing anything about it. Tariffs, tax cuts, etc. but rarely is it mentioned what a weight student loans are around the US economy's neck...
Why are so many borrowing money to get a college degree in a field which won't pay off? For that matter, why are we paying for so many to get high school degrees which don't pay off? The driver of a semi truck, or the cashier at a fast food restaurant, doesn't need to spend four years reading Catcher in the Rye and studying algebra.
That's not saying anything bad about those people or those jobs: they are no doubt good people and those jobs are important and valuable. What I am saying is that rather than automatically paying for everyone's college, we might instead ask what the point of education is, and whether everyone needs to spend four more years at school.
As you might guess, I think the answer is 'no,' and I think that the way that high school changed from something optional for a few to something required of all is instructive.
A better result, I think, would be to make government assistance equally applicable to vocational school, and to outright not offer government assistance (loans or scholarships) for certain degrees in fields with low employment prospects.
Wasn't at all suggesting we should make higher ed free. I made mention of the tax cuts because the Trump admin likes to talk about helping the economy but yet they've said/done nothing about student loans which are proving to be a massive impediment to economic growth.
I don't like the idea of the gov't choosing which degrees/majors are worth funding. We've derisked student loans to a point where lenders don't care about your income prospects. If we allowed students loans to be discharged through bankruptcy you would start to see a big shift in how loans are made. The reality is the entire structure of higher ed right now is a sham.
A big factor for some items is just price. I work full time as an engine mechanic and the price of a burger has gotten absolutely ridiculous. Arbys and Burger King both think their gods gift to meat, but at the end of the day its just shredded iceburg lettuce and mayonnaise between two thoroughly crushed sugary buns. Its not worth $15.
What ive started doing instead is shop-cooked fridays. I'll set up a crock pot of steel cut oats in the morning, and in the afternoon we grill in the back parking lot. everyone chips in a few bucks at the start of the week and its gone over well. Ive had guys from the body shop next door come over and offer to buy burgers instead of hit up the fast food chains along the strip. Its cheaper and easier than waiting for a crushed cold burger up the road.
We used to do something similar to this at our old job. The team would pitch in $5 bucks each and one member's wife (a SAH mom) would send him in with an awesome meal for us once a week.
What are you talking about? McDonald's has a cheeseburger on the value menu for less than $2. If you want something nicer, the single burger with fresh high quality beef at Wendy's is $5.
Here in the Bay area, the price differential between grocery store and restaurants is even greater, due to rapidly rising labor costs and local inflation increasing more rapidly than national inflation. As usual, it all comes back to housing. Restaurants can't hire workers because workers can't afford to live there due to housing problems. As a result, when you go out, dinner for 2 people costs an arm and leg. We just don't go out anymore. But, even the Cafe is getting really expensive. Pearl Milk tea now costs 5.50$ minimum, even here in the east bay. 10 years ago, I remember getting those same bubbly drinks for 3$
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadAnother interesting application of blockchains could be to the yelp/foursquare/tripadvisor/opentable/dining-rewards/loyality space. One protocol to handle menus, reviews, and reward points, instead of a separate incompatible reward app and shitty non mobile website for each damn restaurant. Another, and different component of trust in this ecosystem would be verification of authenticity vs spam.
On one hand: of course, yes, that would be awesome! On the other, the coordination problem vastly overwhelms the technical problem i.e. getting a large group of competitive companies aligned around a single standard is impossible, insert link to xkcd 'competing standards' comic here, etc. I get that blockchain 'solves the trust problem' but the problem of distrust between those competitive actors is not related to former.
OTOOH: if the hype around blockchain is what we need to get those gaggles of competitors aligned around something...
the world standardized around http/smtp. I dont think a standardized restaurant-menu-trust-loyality-payment chain is impossible. Look how long it took email to take off (and then got replaced by facebook.)
Its much more likely for a yelp/foursquare to gobble up the market, but I'd prefer a decentralized protocol for distributing menus...
And to criticize your criticism, standard menu metadata + loyality + reviews is not a complicated process, its just not an angle thats really been attacked before. I dont know of a menu database that is intended to feed third party clients like yelp/foursquare/allmenus. All the menu hosts want to be the end user client. My idea is more about separating the database from the client, and sharing a database between a couple companies. For something like this to happen, all you would need is yelp and foursquare (tripadvisor, opentable, zagat, urbanspoon, zomato) to create a consortium and invite a couple other big players. Its not about the restaurants self organizing.
At the same time, when I go out for dinner at home, the best restaurant experiences are always when I feel 'almost full' when my plate is completely empty, and still have some room left for dessert. Nothing needs to go to waste, and I don't need to take doggy-bags home so I can eat more of the same bland (and now re-heated, soggy) food the next day, as is common in the US (doggy bags are an extremely rare sight where I live). The 'dining out' experience could hardly be any more different comparing the US to the restaurants at home. To make things worse, prices are also way higher in the US, at least the more urban areas in the east and west.
I remember one time staying in an AirBNB in the US, talking to the host who used to own a classic american diner. She had the exact same thoughts about food quality and portion sizes as we did, and told us she actually tried to do it different in her diner. Customers would by default get a small plate of food, but could order more for free if it wasn't enough. For some bizarre reason her customers hated it and kept complaining about the portion size. So she switched back, and almost no-one ever finished their food completely again.
Very quaint obsession with quantity, if you ask me.
It would be so much easier if it was just what I'm used to here: if you just order food, you'll get enough for a 'normal' eater. You can always go bigger or smaller, depending on if you are a 'big eater' or not. The default in the US seems to be that the size of the standard order needs to satisfy a giant construction worker who hasn't eaten for two days.
I remember ordering blueberry pancakes for breakfast once, and got a pile a that was almost a foot high. Even though the pancakes were actually pretty good, I think I finished less then 1/4th of them. That just makes no sense.
I feel a great need to finish what I am served, and is has been a hard fought battle to not do that when the portion sizes are as ridiculously oversized as they can be in America.
Eating with my spouse helps, as we can always split plates, but still. Vastly prefer smaller portion sizes.
A bit gauche, I realize, but better that than overeating. Rather striking to have such a concrete illustration that restaurants were giving me fully twice as much food as I really needed to be eating, too.
The one that sticks out most is the emotional abuse I'd received from friends parent's when I couldn't finish my entire plate (but still ate a little bit of everything).
Fuck them for that.
If I order an entree at a restaurant, I want that meal to be my biggest meal of the day, with rare exception. A meal at a restaurant is a special occasion, and should be a source of hospitality. The prime way for the restaurant to provide this hospitality is to accomodate my hunger! If I am still hungry at all after ordering and finishing an entree, then I am not satisfied.
I'm totally fine with eating a bunch of cheap filler sides (fries, rice, etc) to make me full. Often times, I feel like more expensive restaurants do a worse job at actually filling you up with the entree, because they want to tack on appetizers, small plates, etc. I leave these sorts of restaurants angry sometimes. Just give me food, dang it!
To reply to your thoughts, I always had read that restaurants and food in general were cheaper in the U.S. Curious that you found the opposite to be true.
In America, we stuff ourselves without realizing we're doing so.
(I live here too, I'm just poking fun at our culture)
As an expat dining in the US is stupidly expensive. I've had 3-course lunches at french restaurants that didn't cost more than $20. I consider myself lucky if I can eke $30/pp at the local wingery after food, drinks, taxes, and gratuity.
If you compare the same quality food, it is way more expensive in the US. I can get a very decent 3-course meal here (Netherlands) for $20, maybe $30 if you include drinks (wine, beer). To get the same quality food in CA (and I've visited many, many places there) I would have to spend at least $50 without drinks, without tips.
Of course I can get food for $20 or $30 in CA at every corner of the street as well, but the quality will be way below what I expect for that money. The difference in perspective is probably that in the US there seem to be 9 low-end places for every decend mid-range restaurant, while here it's more like 50-50. Not trying to be a snob here, that's just my perception.
At the high-end it's way worse even, by the way. For $100 I can get a royal 6-course high-cuisine meal with accompanying wines for every course here, even at some restaurants rated with a Michelin star. I've been to places in e.g. Palo Alto, which were pretty good, but nowhere near the level of even a single michelin star, and the bill would approach $200 per person after including drinks and tips. Portion size was not a problem in these cases, by the way ;-)
also, good western european(?) food (spanish/french/italian/etc) is more expensive than, say, good asian or latin american food. the plating of food into courses will bias you toward those more expensive restaurants, by the way. my favorite restaurants are typically single plate/bowl by design, which you can then share family-style by ordering a few items.
i'd also echo the point that good food costs way more in northern california than in southern california. socal just has many more cheaper, good restaurants to choose from.
http://languageoffood.blogspot.com/2009/08/entree.html?m=1
What about the French usage? The French use of the word entrée in Escoffier's 1921 Le Guide Culinaire was still the traditional one ('made' hot meat dishes served in the classic sequence before a roast). Escoffier classifies as entrées almost any dish that we would now consider a main course: steaks (entrecotes or filet de boeuf, tournedos), cassoulet, lamb or veal cutlets, ham, sausage, braised leg of lamb (gigot), stews or sautes of chicken, pigeon or turkey, braised goose, foie gras. Escoffier has over 500 pages of entrée recipes. Only roast fowl, and small game animals are classified as roasts, in a small 14 page roast section.
You state that it's difficult for a fast food restaurant to manage a la carte purchases when that's exactly what they are designed to do. Their entire business model is based around an a la carte menu.
You then justify larger portions as a means to mitigate customers ordering additional portions. The reality is that for most casual or low end dining the customer knows what to expect and orders appropriately. At best your assertion about large portions would only work to satisfy first time customers.
Fast food can bring the total cost closer to the raw ingredients by increasing the utilization of real estate, capital, and labor. A fine dining restaurant needs to dedicate much more real estate and staff to each customer, since they cannot serve as many customers in one time period. At the same time, they probably need at least some higher cost ingredients to satisfy the different expectations of a customer willing to pay higher prices.
I don't know if it is still a thing, but last time I went to a TGI Fridays (a few years ago now) they had a menu option to make the portions smaller for a couple of bucks off. The caveat is that it didn't increase the quality of the food--and that's kind of a problem for a TGI Fridays.
Finally, if you're going to something that calls itself a diner, you normally aren't expecting fine dining. The expectation is a big old plate of greasy fried chow. There is an expectation mismatch that is going to generate a lot of complaints.
That said, I totally agree that way too many restaurants in the US subscribe to the "if we can't make it good, at least we can make it big" philosophy. There are certain establishments I won't even patronize because they're so ridiculous in this regard, like the Cheesecake Factory. "Here is your 4lb of spaghetti, but be sure to save room for the 2lb slice of cheesecake we are named for!"
That's why you can get different toppings on either side of the pizza- so two people don't have to buy two separate pizzas.
One thing that kills table turns are people who stay for dessert or coffee. On way to prevent that is to serve plates overloaded with cheap carb fillers (rice, fries, etc). People feel obligated to eat what is on the plate and when stuffed won’t linger.
Other tips are to use hard surfaces (floors, walls, ceilings) so that the acoustics make it hard to talk; move tables to the center of the room; have waiters show up with check-in-hand when they ask about desserts; drop the check early; keep the restaurant too cold (too hot, men complain, too cold women leave); and put TVs on the walls (kills conversations).
I suspect the less cosmopolitan areas of the US are very similar though.
If I order a Big Mac in New York it pretty much is the same as one in Omaha and is pretty much the same as it was 20 years ago. Necessary changes that are made are deliberately small and the quality is basically the same over time in my experience.
This is purely observational based on looking at fast food restaurants in the city and suburbs. It would be interesting to see how it varies across regions.
I'm not even certain if they should try to keep up. Sure, they can offer me hummus and crudites for a light lunch when I'm on the road. But grocery stores already have that covered, and at a price point that's probably much lower than McDonald's could manage. And they can offer me beans, rice and fixins, but Qdoba will already sell me two meals' worth of that for less than twice the cost of a single meal at McDonald's, so again, there just isn't a lot of gold for them in them thar hills.
In the late 90s everything at Subway was prepared fresh in store and the meat was single origin. Today everything comes in bags and the "meat" is lower in quality than the crappiest of hot dog.
Chipotle went from fresh in 2001 to unsanitary burrito factory in 2017. They're being followed down the hole cloesly by Moe's and a bit further back by Willy's.
Starbucks went from a high end coffee house in the 90s to a candy store.
Dunkin Donuts in the 90s made fresh donuts nightly in store, today they have them shipped in from factory and aren't any better than grocery store bakery donuts, just more varied.
Perhaps that's the natural order of most fast food as they chase margins. Death by a thousand compromises.
My (wild) guess is that some of this is that the motherships are permitting overbuilding. They get their franchising fees regardless, and don't necessarily have a whole lot of reason to care if their franchisees are bringing in enough business to turn a healthy profit.
"Peak restaurant" is in the peak boom years of 1999-2000 and 2007-8. What's interesting is that it hasn't recovered even though the economy nominally has. This lends credence to the "unequal recovery" theories, that although growth is up and unemployment appears to be down people don't actually have nearly as much spending money.
It's not necessarily more expensive than home cooking. A value menu cheeseburger at McDonald's is $1[1]. First result on google[2] says ground beef, 100% beef, per lb. is $3.75. The McDonald's cheeseburger's patty has a weight of 1.6oz or .1lbs, which of the aforementioned ground beef would cost $0.375. Tomato is estimated at $0.08 cents per slice, buns at $0.41 per bun, and lettuce at $0.02 for a leaf[4]. The slice of cheese is estimated at $0.29[5].
.375 + .08 + .41 + .02 + .29 = 1.175. So the homemade burger costs more not even accounting for the opportunity cost of the time to make it, the fact that you're probably not going to use all those ingredients and eventually throw some of them out, gas/electric for the stove, and possible butter/vegetable oil.
Not that it isn't worth it to make homemade burgers - they're definitely better than McDonald's, especially if you get local grass fed beef, but I like the unique taste of fast food restaurants and the economies of scale work in their favor to make things cheap, sometimes cheaper than cooking it yourself.
And on health, I don't see how the McDonald's burger is any worse for you than a homecooked one. McDonald's one probably has less grease. Maybe beef quality, but I'm not sure quality of beef has a direct impact on healthiness.
1: https://www.fastfoodmenuprices.com/mcdonalds-prices/
2: https://www.bls.gov/regions/mid-atlantic/data/AverageRetailF...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_McDonald%27s_products
4: https://www.aol.com/2011/03/01/savings-experiment-the-great-...
5: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-exactly-how-much-you...
More realistic would be to compare the food value derived from a $1 McDonalds hamburger with what $1 can buy at a discount/bulk grocery store in dried beans, sweet potatoes, onions, and other high bang-for-buck items.
Typically they do. Poor people aren't idiots. They know that prepared store food is grossly overpriced compared to a similar meal they assemble themselves and seek to avoid it as much as possible without spending too much time/effort on meal prep. They usually manage to drag themselves to Walmart or the local supermarket every 1-2 weeks. Even if you have to drag your ass to some far away supermarket because it's the only one open after you get home from work and get 3hr of sleep that night you'll still do it because of the huge cost reduction compared to prepared food or whatever your local convenience store has. You'll buy the same bunch of things every time because over time you figure out a bunch of relatively low effort and low cost meals and then stick to them. Lunch or breakfast will probably be the same thing every day and you'll skip the other. They buy gas station sandwiches and junk food more than the rich because when your menu is the same boring things on a 2wk cycle so it's a nice, low mental effort, way to shake things up from time to time.
The home cooked meals poor people eat are just far less balanced than ideal because they're more skewed toward ease of prep and cost than what rich people eat. Instead of a salad they'll bring a PB&J and a few Oreos to work. Something like (microwave) baked potatoes and chicken nuggets, maybe with a vegetable side (or something similarly imbalanced but cheap) will probably be on the menu at least one night a week.
"Food deserts" are a problem but less of a problem than they seem to be because what rich people think poor people should be eating and what poor people think they should be eating are vastly different.
The whole paleo thing. What I jokingly call the "troglodiet". Beans, wild rice, big leafy greens. Much less meat, dairy, starchy carbs.
It's weird that cheaper is more healthy.
I really only need a pressure cooker, cutting board, knives, a few bowls, some storage. I've unloaded most everything else. I'm basically camping at home.
But I had to get more wealthy to even become aware of these options, choices.
Proposed mechanism: The Great Recession forced people to cook at home out of financial necessity. Home-chefs' skill and confidence increased (human capital). Rich-media internet video sites provided step-by-step visual instructions (lowered barriers to entry). People bought knives and slow cookers and avocado slicers (capital investment).
I sure wouldn't want to compete against that hypothetical!
...I wonder if there is any literature on this topic (would love a pointer!)
TL;dr- slow clap for some top tier smug nonsense, but your point is extremely invalid and undermines the hard work millions of people are putting in every day at these establishments.
I'm fine calling that guy smug, because that's an extremely smug thought.
Also, you do have an internalized bias against McDonald's and you just showed it. To you, a restaurant isn't "a place that serves food" but "a move expensive establishment..." That's not to say you're a bad person, just that you're shifting definitions from what something objectively is to what you think something should be.
Here in the US, restaurant workers across the board are not paid enough and there are massive labor issues tied to the industry. Fast food workers especially are treated abhorrently because "that's not even a real restaurant" or "that's a job for a kid to get out of high school".
I'll fully admit that my past influences my thoughts on the matter, but what I'm trying to do is say that this sort of behavior isn't cool, and remind people that these places are often franchises run by a guy employing people from your neighborhood.
McDonald's food is objectively of a lower quality than that of other restaurants. It's still a restaurant, no matter how dismissive people want to be.
It's fast food...
If you peel back the curtain on a lot of ongoing changes in consumer preferences I think you'll find student loans are always a contributing factor to some degree - especially among younger generations.
And yet we aren't doing anything about it. Tariffs, tax cuts, etc. but rarely is it mentioned what a weight student loans are around the US economy's neck...
That's not saying anything bad about those people or those jobs: they are no doubt good people and those jobs are important and valuable. What I am saying is that rather than automatically paying for everyone's college, we might instead ask what the point of education is, and whether everyone needs to spend four more years at school.
As you might guess, I think the answer is 'no,' and I think that the way that high school changed from something optional for a few to something required of all is instructive.
A better result, I think, would be to make government assistance equally applicable to vocational school, and to outright not offer government assistance (loans or scholarships) for certain degrees in fields with low employment prospects.
I don't like the idea of the gov't choosing which degrees/majors are worth funding. We've derisked student loans to a point where lenders don't care about your income prospects. If we allowed students loans to be discharged through bankruptcy you would start to see a big shift in how loans are made. The reality is the entire structure of higher ed right now is a sham.
What ive started doing instead is shop-cooked fridays. I'll set up a crock pot of steel cut oats in the morning, and in the afternoon we grill in the back parking lot. everyone chips in a few bucks at the start of the week and its gone over well. Ive had guys from the body shop next door come over and offer to buy burgers instead of hit up the fast food chains along the strip. Its cheaper and easier than waiting for a crushed cold burger up the road.