Miraculously, if Obama wins, we won't be seeing stories like this after Nov. 4.
I quit going to restaurants when they banned smoking. Geez, that’s gotta be about 15 years ago.
I will still do take-out occasionally..........
Several chain and locally owned restaurants have closed here in Reno including the only Krispy Kreme. It was reported today that office rental prices have dropped an average of 20% as well.
I don’t see drive thru restaurants hurting. At meal times there are always lines of cars for the drive through.
Why would they survey bartenders and other employees. it is the owners of restuarants and bars that know the real score.
Anyone who has ever worked in a bar knows the vast majority of drinkers order beer. What alcoholic beverage is cheaper than beer?
“Honey, we don’t have enough money to eat out... So why don’t you go spend a fifty bucks on cook books and 300 hundred bucks on cooking untensils. We don’t have the money to pay for the stuff since we are laid off. So put it on the credit card that we can no longer make the payments on.”
You don’t need a cook book to make scrambled eggs for breakfast and baloney sandwiches for lunch and dinner.
Bull CRAP.
We run two restaurants. They have been up by more than 40% this year over last.
Mark
On a recent visit to Carrabba's, we noted that the restaurant was only half full. In the past, it would have been full.
Restaurant prices are up, portions are smaller and service isn't what it used to be. All that makes dining out a less enjoyable experience than it used to be. The actions that the restaurants are taking to make a go of it seem to be self-defeating.
My Mother, who lives in a suburb of Chicago, reports much the same thing.
The chown hall is just as crowded as ever. ;-)
What I noticed was a sharp drop in drive-in customers as gas prices escalated. And the drop in gas prices does not seem to have changed that, so far.
McCuisine
Fast Food High Brow Menu:
McChat — Chateaubriand: 2 All beef loins special spice on a sesame seed bun
McSuzy: Crepes Suzette: breakfast burritos with orange marmelade.
McSole: Dover sole meuniere: fish sandwish with fish dipped in brown butter batter.
Looks like the restaurants need a bailout too. Some chains are too big to fail!!
From my anecdotal evidence:
1. Menu prices have risen about 20% in the past 2 years.
2. Restaurants are offering more specials during the week to get customers in during slow times (sort of counters #1, don’t you think?)
3. People may not be dining out less, but they are ordering less, looking for values and cutting back on appetizers and beverages.
4. Fuel costs hit the consumer this year and some discretionary expenses had to go; dining out is pretty much discretionary.
It’s absolutely crucial to enforce a top-down, who-cares-what-people-want blanket tobacco prohibition on all bars, clubs, and restaurants. “It’s for the children.”
This should help revitalize flagging sales no doubt.
We won’t eat out anymore. I’m sick of hearing cell phones ringing while trying to eat.
We go out to eat two to three times a week and the parking lots and restaurants are always busy. We usually have a short wait. This is Minnesota, and several bars have closed, but that is because of the smoking ban, not a poor economy. People here have plenty of money to spend in restaurants.
I live in the No. 1 restaurant hellhole in America. The carcasses of closed restaurants liter the roadways. And with good cause.
The food is insipid, over-cooked, under cooked, tasteless and the “chefs” haven’t discovered there are other spices beyond salt and pepper. A “fresh” fish dinner will land you a freezer-burned 4 ounce chunk of two year old salmon. Steak dinners are roadkill sprinkled with skunk spray and cooked over old rubber tires.
Whenever I travel, I hit the restaurants with a vengeance. I love eating out. I recently returned from a swing down to South Carolina and have found a new love - deep fried southern home cooking.
I want to move there. Fried chicken with rice and collard greens and peach cobbler. Yum! That’s heaven.
If Obozo manages to steal the election and get in the White House, there will be a lot more restaurants and many other businesses closing, due to his many tax increases and increased regulation.
Or maybe the USSA (United Socialist States of America) will just take over and run this businesses, rather than let them fail.
I’ve felt the effects already. I work in an upper middle income community. I provide private instruction ( I won’t say what to protect the innocent, and me), and I recently had the parent of one of my best students saying they might have to cut back from an hour to a half-hour. He works in the restaurant biz and he says they’re getting killed. He’s going to hang in there this month because he’s a good dad, loves his daughter, she’s going great and loves it, but if things don’t improve (and I don’t expect them to), he’ll have to cut back.
A couple of restaurants have closed here in Louisville and I hear the pizza delivery business has slowed quite a bit.
I haven’t noticed a lot closing, but over the last year and a half, I have noticed price increases and/or noticeably smaller portion sizes for the same price or more. Decreasing portion sizes and trying to pass it off for the same price ticks me off more than just raising the price, and I stopped going to several places that do this.
Examples: Outback Steakhouse I alwalys used to get the shrimp griller (kabobs). It used to be 3 huge kabobs that I could never finsh, now it is two small ones that don’t even fill you up.
Culver’s: my kids usually get a ‘free’ scoop of ice cream after their meal. They used to fill the cup so it was mounding over, now the scoop doesn’t even reach the top- it’s maybe 2/3 full. The hamburger patties are noticeably smaller, as well.
Taco Bell: the prices of all the meals have gone up noticeably and you literally have to use a magnifying glass to see any meat. Even my kids noticed that the tacos were all lettuce and tomato with a sprinkling of cheese and meat. Our family of five spent $27 there and we were still hungry.
This seems to happen everywhere we go (which is becoming less and less because I’m sick of getting ripped off).
My sister and I went to Olive Garden yesterday for lunch and asked about the “all you can eat” special they’ve had for years. Great deal, lots of food, low cost. The waitress said they had stopped the all you can eat last week. Guess they aren’t doing too bad since they can afford to charge full prices from their lunch menu.
Perhaps american’s will rediscover the joy of an afternoon picnic in the park instead of a quick burger and a visit to the mall on weekend afternoons.
Just a thought.
I work as a bartender in a fine dining restaurant in Asheville, and all I can say is that sales are almost 40% down. :-(
Most of the restaurants in town are doing the same amount of business as usual.
Where I’m at, people are still buying $3000 bottles of wine like they were soda pop...but for how long?