Americans are making hard choices with their dollars these days. And no other recession indicator is hitting quite as hard as the reduction in restaurant spending. The belt-tightening starts with larger durable goods, but then quickly trends to suddenly making your chicken tenders at home. And with these prices, who could blame someone for driving home to panfry some your tendies instead of hitting up KFC?
Zac Rios breaks down another reason why this trend may be hitting hard: when sit-down restaurants are getting their food from a single source supplier, the taste profile of all these ostensibly “unique dining experiences” becomes flattened, and it makes less and less sense to spend your precious dollars on something you could buy at Costco or Sam’s Club.
There are plenty of customer testimonials on YouTube about the declining quality of food, higher prices for less of that worse food, and, perhaps uniquely to the experience in the United States, tip fatigue. Americans are being squeezed from all sides, pressured to stretch their depreciating dollars further, and finding themselves in fewer situations where they can pay $20 for a meal at a fast-food chain.
It would hardly be a Xennial blog unless we took a look at what other Xennials are saying: