Posted on 01/05/2019 5:48:25 AM PST by raccoonradio
Half of the Papa Gino’s pizza/ sub places closed.Deep debt.
—Food quality, portions went down
—More competition
—People more likely to order then take it home.Why pay rent for a big restaurant if there are all kinds of empty tables and booths?
“There is a new steak house opening up where Hilltop used to be. The neon green cactus in front has been painstakingly restored to its former glory!”
I go to a lot of “steak houses” and find that they rarely meet my expectations. Not to say I didn’t enjoy them, but I can usually cook a much better steak- and it’s not $50.
On Columbus Day I took the MBTA into Boston to see Louis Prima Jr at City Winery near the Boston Garden.Got out very near the place and spent less than $10 at a Jimmy John’s for a sub, chips, soda rather than the City Winery overpriced food.
No need to spend huge amount for parking.
Well there’s that. Thankful for that.
I think it was mainly a change in culture. Families seemed bigger, and homes were not much entertainment centers, and the culture predominated for whom going out to eat a steak dinner was a real event. Many or most of whom were baby boomers, who are now dad or in nursing homes.
But related to demographics, it is competition and the type of it that negatively affect restaurants like Hilltop:
..wrote Eugene Wei, a technologist and writer who is currently the head of video at Oculus, in a 2015 essay. “It’s hard to think of any sphere of American life where the selection and quality have improved so much as food,” the economist Tyler Cowen, who moonlights as a food blogger, wrote this year. For the first time in US history, Americans are spending more money dining out than in grocery stores.
But if it’s truly the golden age of restaurants, why is there such widespread concern about the state of the restaurant industry? Last year was “the worst restaurant year since the recession,” according to QSR Magazine. Dinner “traffic,” the industry term for the number of walk-in customers, has been falling for five straight years, says market-research firm NPD Group Inc. The lunch business is in a veritable depression.
Restaurants have grown from 25 percent of food spending in the 1950s to more than half, today. The shift has been accelerating: In the last decade, spending at restaurants and bars has grown twice as fast as all other retail spending, like clothes and cars.
But today there are simply too many places to eat, according to Victor Fernandez, executive director at Black Box Intelligence, a restaurant data firm. “Half of our food dollar is now going to restaurants, but we have more supply than we have demand,” he said.
The decline in traffic, along with rising labor costs, has forced restaurateurs to raise their prices to pay the rent. As a result, dining out is getting more expensive. The relative price of “food away” (government-speak for restaurants and snacks) versus food at home (government-speak for groceries) has never been higher,
For cheap eats, fast food remains a huge and growing market. On the high end, both the fine-dining and fast casual sectors are growing, even if individual restaurants are struggling to eke out market share in a hyper-competitive environment. But then there’s the middle-class of restaurants, also known as “casual dining”—full-service restaurants where the typical check is between $15 and $25, per person. This is where the pain lives.
Excepts from lengthy read at https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/06/its-the-golden-age-of-restaurants-in-america/530955/
I still have gift cards from two years ago for Olive Garden. Every time we try to go, it's about a two hour wait so we drive to somewhere else. Inexplicable. I am underwhelmed with Olive Garden and would only go because I have a gift card and if there is no wait outside.
Red Lobster - couldn't even get me in there with a gift card. I'd give the card to somebody else.
I will wait for the Texas Roadhouse. At least you can munch on free peanuts from a barrel while you are waiting - and they encourage you to toss the shells to the floor! So nice gimmick. Plus the steaks aren't all that bad.
That’s a real interesting analysis of the restaurant industry. It seems to conform to what I’ve noticed around here.
Yes, the Atlantic has some good articles sometimes, despite the mostly liberal ones.
Funny, I gave a couple of Christmas gift cards away to my sister. I know I won’t use them and she will. Pretty sure one of them was a re-gift from my friend to me. As we get older all that stuff matters less.
After working in the food biz from Denny’s up to fine dining there’s not much magic left in eating out. Home cooking is the best.
Massachusetts is overwhelmingly leftist. I really don’t know why a conservative would operate in such a hostile area. Voters and their representatives literally hate business owners. There should be none in Mass.
First mistake, they should have bought the location instead of renting.
Everything else was destined to happen as our Nation strayed from the ideals promised by our Constitution, the most important being individual freedom.
Then again, things change just because.
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