Two small salads and two small drinks came to 31.00 dollars.

Aunt Marg said:
We never eat out. Last time we were out for a meal was back in February.

I'm confident no restaurant will see hide-nor-hair of dear husband or myself in 2021.
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I wonder about the impact long term that this COVID-19 era will bring:

1. More folks working from home
2. Schools adjusting to distance learning
3. At least some folks realizing they can get a hair cut at home (myself included)
4. Folks getting used to making their own meals and the efficiency of take-out as an alternative to dining at restaurants
5. Many common relatively minor maladies being diagnosed and self-treatment plans handled remotely instead of having to go in to a clinic for everything

We live in interesting times. Such changes have been developing and had been on the horizon for some time, but the COVID situation accelerated their implementation. The impact of these changes will have a kind of domino effect on any market areas that depended on the way things were such as all the fast food and restaurants clustered around office areas where employees went out for lunch and/or met for dinner and drinks after work, barber shops, dining in restaurants, clinic staffing, school admin personnel staffing, etc.

Tony
 
The only reason I ever went out to a restaurant id for food I can't prepare at home. I never go out for steaks or salads because I am better at it than most not all, restaurants. One thing I never get ticked about is price. Not that I am stupid but the price is on the menu and if it is not then ask. There was an east coast owner of a seafood place near me that refused to show the prices on any of his food. "MARKET PRICE" was on a chalk board in the very small place. The SOUP OF THE DAY was clam chowder. I asked "how much" and the waitress said she would have to ask. Have to ask on the soup of the day?? She came back with the price and I agreed simply because good clam chowder is not east to find here. But that was it. I did not order anything else and not too long after the place closed. I have been to many eat joints on our coasts and always the "Daily Market" prices are always on a chalk board.
 
tbeltrans said:
I wonder about the impact long term that this COVID-19 era will bring:

1. More folks working from home
2. Schools adjusting to distance learning
3. At least some folks realizing they can get a hair cut at home (myself included)
4. Folks getting used to making their own meals and the efficiency of take-out as an alternative to dining at restaurants
5. Many common relatively minor maladies being diagnosed and self-treatment plans handled remotely instead of having to go in to a clinic for everything

We live in interesting times. Such changes have been developing and had been on the horizon for some time, but the COVID situation accelerated their implementation. The impact of these changes will have a kind of domino effect on any market areas that depended on the way things were such as all the fast food and restaurants clustered around office areas where employees went out for lunch and/or met for dinner and drinks after work, barber shops, dining in restaurants, clinic staffing, school admin personnel staffing, etc.

Tony
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Honestly, Tony, I hope it has long-lasting and far-reaching ramifications never imagined, and I hope it lasts for years to come.
 
Pepper said:
You love music @tbeltrans. What do you feel about where concerts and small public music events are going in the future?
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Good question! I think these will continue once we are no longer passing and being infected by COVID-19. I see these as separate from businesses that need to function every day and depended on daily streams of customers. Concerts and small public music events are just that -special events outside the normal daily flow of commerce. Another example where I live would be the annual Minnesota State Fair.

According to local public television, the only times in the history of the state fair that it has been closed down for the week at the end of August that it normally runs, was during the height of polio and this year for COVID-19. The next year after it has previously been closed down, attendance was the same as it always had been. I suspect that will happen again next year if the fair is allowed to run.

There are various developments that have taken their toll on live music. Back when I was playing full time professionally (late 1976-early 1978), disco was impacting live music when club owners discovered they could increase their margins by replacing live music with DJs. Then, music began to get distributed digitally freely on the internet. Then, that was addressed to some degree, but in the mean time, artists found they no longer needed record companies because they could sell their music online through various new store front operations that were coming into being for that purpose (i.e. cdbaby, the various streaming services, private web sites).

The music business has changed drastically in the past several years. I make it a point, whenever possible, to purchase music directly from the artists themselves off their web sites so they get as much of the money as possible. I hope others do likewise. We truly CAN vote with our dollars these days as a result.

This is just a guess on my part since I don't have a crystal ball.

I just don't see people not going to whatever live music events there may be after COVID-19 because that is not the same business model as commercial venues that rely on a daily flow of customers to stay afloat. Such events are special in that they break up the humdrum of daily life. Restaurants probably couldn't survive if the only customers they got were those who went out for the occasional special occasion.

Tony
 
Aunt Marg said:
Honestly, Tony, I hope it has long-lasting and far-reaching ramifications never imagined, and I hope it lasts for years to come.
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That could well be. I only listed the really obvious effects that everyone can probably see. Because I worked in the technology that developed the equipment to allow these changes, I saw it coming quite some time ago, but not this quickly. Whatever other effects there will be, I can't say either.

Edit: I should clarify that I am guessing about the use of barbers and people going out to eat, since those don't involve technology for remote access. It may well be that those markets return to normal soon after lockdowns are lifted. However, with regard to remote access to products, we are seeing the impact of online shopping on brick and mortar stores, but that was already happening prior to the impact of COVID-19, so any changes with regard to COVID-19 would seem to me to simply accelerate that.

Tony
 
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fmdog44 said:
The only reason I ever went out to a restaurant id for food I can't prepare at home. I never go out for steaks or salads because I am better at it than most not all, restaurants. One thing I never get ticked about is price. Not that I am stupid but the price is on the menu and if it is not then ask. There was an east coast owner of a seafood place near me that refused to show the prices on any of his food. "MARKET PRICE" was on a chalk board in the very small place. The SOUP OF THE DAY was clam chowder. I asked "how much" and the waitress said she would have to ask. Have to ask on the soup of the day?? She came back with the price and I agreed simply because good clam chowder is not east to find here. But that was it. I did not order anything else and not too long after the place closed. I have been to many eat joints on our coasts and always the "Daily Market" prices are always on a chalk board.
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This has typically been my wife's and my criteria for choosing where to go to dine out. If we can easily make the stuff at home, we won't choose to go out to eat that. Hamburgers and sandwiches are examples of items we don't seek for dining out.

As for seafood on the east coast, that is such a treat since I don't often get out that way, that I am willing to pay for it. Besides, that sort of travel has (for me) been business travel so it is a company expense account anyway. (y)

Tony
 
Aneeda72 said:
Tell us, I want to know
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OK, but just remember, you requested it.
An "All you can eat" type restaurant encourages people to put much more food on their plates than they can eat because they want their money's worth & they're paying the same price, regardless of how much they take. They'll also want to try food they may not like. Quite a bit of food is left on plates & a restaurant is a high-expense business, so much of the food left on plates is put back in the buffet..........recycled (to put it nicely). The kitchen staff is well trained on "refreshing" leftovers that may have been coughed & sneezed on (or even worse) by previous diners.
You would be appalled at what hidden cameras worn by undercover employees revealed in restaurants.

What about those letter grades posted in restaurant windows - A, B, C? Several health inspectors were fined for selling A's for thousands of dollars to unsafe restaurants that couldn't pass inspection.

"Dateline NBC" also had their employees get hired at supermarkets. They wore hidden cameras & part of their training involved changing the "Use by" dates on meat packaging & also dipping old meat in a bucket of blood kept in the butcher area for that purpose to make it appear fresh. Mmmmm......
Now that restaurants are struggling even more to stay afloat, you can expect even worse cost cutting.
 
Robert59 said:
This was at a restaurant called Gondola which I think was real high. What do you think about this? We mainly went because it had very few people.
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It seems that another "side effect" of this virus is higher prices at "eateries" that are still open. A couple of weeks ago, we were doing some shopping and decided to get a quick meal at a local Taco Bell....a couple of burrito's and 2 small coffees. Their drive thru menu didn't have the prices listed, and something like this should cost less than $10. When the person taking the order said $16, I said OK, and pulled out of the drive thru lane, and left.....they can have their burritos.
 
Drinks are what drive most totals up. $3 minimum, likely $3.50 per soda. That’s $31-$7= $24. $24/2= $12 per salad. Less if the $31 included tax. Not shocking when the price is broken down.

Look in the grocery store, prices are going up & expected to do so radically in 2021.

Overall, I do feel that those prices seem high for lunch. Even at Burger King, etc it doesn’t take long for it to add up.
 
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I don't eat out anymore. If I want something from a particular place I will order delivery. There are discounts that I get through email that I will use. My birthday is tomorrow and I am thinking of having my fav Mexican meal delivered. The meal is so large that I can easily get 2 lunches from it. I will not want it again for awhile so I might splurge and get it.
 
tbeltrans said:
Back before the early 1990s, most of us engineers would go out to lunch every day. We didn't go to expensive places since some of the people knew of hole-in-the-wall places where the food was good and reasonably priced. However, somewhere in the early to mid-90s, we noticed prices going up a bit more than we wanted to spend, so most of us soon started bringing our own lunches and stopped going out to eat except for the occasional special occasion. This trend has been going on for some time.

Since my wife and I only go out to eat once every couple of weeks, and then usually to lunch rather than dinner, we notice the price trend too. It seems to me to be a Catch-22 situation in which the restaurant owners need to charge more to make ends meet as their costs increase and (currently due to COVID-19) customer base shrinks, but at the same time, more people reach a point at which they can't (or won't, as in our case) afford those prices.

Despite all that, when restaurants are allowed to have indoor seating, we see them rather full anyway, so somebody has the money for this kind of expense. I look at it and figure for what one glass of beverage costs when eating out, I can buy a whole week's supply or even more. For what one meal costs, I can feed myself for several days. In the end, it comes down to your spending priorities. Eating out has simply not been a priority for us, so it is relatively easy for a restaurant to price us off their list of customers.

Edit: at some point, the market should be self-correcting, in which prices reach a point where the customer base falls off and the restaurant must adjust its practices such that they can bring prices down to a point at which customers start coming back. Of course, this picture would be of pre-COVID times. With COVID-19, it would be very difficult to determine where that price point is since basic survival overshadows normal business and market developments.

Tony
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We used to go out for lunch when I was working, too. But, as you said, it crept up until it was just too expensive and almost all of us started bringing something for lunch.
 
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