Millennials are killing chains like Buffalo Wild Wings and Applebee's
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Fundamentally, I can get a far better meal by any metric - price, quality of food, flavor, often more than one of the above - pretty much anywhere other than casual dining chains like Applebees/Buffalo Wild Wings. If I'm going to dedicate the time and money to sitting down and going out, I'd like something better than two microwaved steaks and a platter of mozzarella sticks for $25.
While I agree with your sentiment, the specific claim is that some types of chains are dying off because millennials are eating from other types of chains instead.
But yeah, everybody's doing that, not just millennials. With the lowering quality of food, crammed bulk-rate table service, and no time or cost advantage, these sorts of places have turned off customers of all ages. Of course the newer-comers aren't going to attach to them.
Maybe millenials care about these things because we want value for our money and don't want to spend it solely on the basis of Super Bowl advertisements?
I only wish chains like Subway, Dominos and Papa Johns would go under as well. No chance of course because a) they spend billions on advertising and b) people don't know good sandwiches or pizza any longer
"good" pizza (In LA at least) often starts above $20 excluding tax and tip.
There are many times I want to order, say, Milo & Olive. But do I really want to spend $30 just to eat some properly baked dough with a few dollar's worth of toppings? No thanks.
At least that's kind of how I feel when I take a cab in NYC where the default tip% buttons on the credit card machines are 20/25/30.
Does it do that at all? I would suspect that it increases the mean but also the variance.
If it's anchor vs. no norm, sure. But anchoring is trying to move a pre-existing social norm as to tipping rates, so its an additional competing standard to which some but not all people will be drawn from whatever their prior basis was, not a standard introduced where none existed before.
> "Millennial consumers are more attracted than their elders to cooking at home..."
Almost as if this generation, having less to spend, has learned to enjoy cheaper options.
> "...ordering delivery from restaurants and eating quickly, in fast-casual or quick-serve restaurants...Customers often spend less when ordering delivery..."
Supporting the argument that they're poorer on average, with a dash of having less free time. I wonder how much this behavior intersects with having to work multiple jobs?
Combined with sub-par food from these establishments, it's no wonder they're having problems.
I know - such selfishness! Think of the shareholders!
Reminds me of another comment on here that talked about how so much of tech is solving communication problems. In this case the communication of past human experiences to a current restaraunt goer.
And this is also precisely why I don't have any moral reservations blocking ads. Ads are being obsoleted as a source of information so that it's increasingly hard to justify why we would need any of them to fulfil our needs.
(Though, personally, I find Cheesecake Factory pretty darn good from a massive chain restaurant perspective)
All of the chains like Buffalo Wild Wings and Applebee's serve absolutely horrible food, with horrible service, with no redeeming qualities anywhere in the experience.
And then do so at an abusively high price.
Fuck them, and they deserve to go under.
I like Buffalo Wild Wings food (well, the wings at least), but everytime I go there it's this gymnasium-sized open restaurant with awful music playing... There's a bar, but it's not what I want a bar to be. There are booths, but they offer no privacy.
It's just a place to get wings, which is fine, but for what I spend going to bdubs I can go to any number of other places with equally good or better food, which also have a better atmosphere.
We'll still order takeout on occasion but if we're gonna sit down to eat there's no reason to eat at BW3's. Applebee's, Friday's , and Ruby Tuesday's just aren't good enough for the money you spend. I'd rather eat somewhere local with a more interesting and well executed menu for the money.
I feel like ten years ago more of the food was cooked on premises but now it seems like almost everything is frozen and microwaved.
I also wonder if there is evidence that millenials are more health conscious and see these places as unhealthy?
Right now, they bring out some giant chart and you have to decipher it while cross referencing the menu. It takes longer, lowers your confidence that they know what they are doing and is embarrassing for the person having to dig through it all. Somebody at Applebee's needs to take a trip to Outback and ask for a gluten free menu.
Bottom line: if somebody in the group will have to worry about their meal, the restaurant is off the list.
I know two people who claim to be sensitive to corn. I'm not about to argue with them, I know the corn we have today in the U.S. is nothing like our grandparent's corn.
Once the evidence rises above self-reported gluten sensitivity or self-reported improvement on a gluten-free diet, the medical community will consider that possibility. Until then, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
https://sciencelife.uchospitals.edu/2014/02/05/dr-faq-stefan...
Unless she was celiac more than 4 years ago, I'm disinclined to believe the claims, unless it's backedup by labwork or evidence.
Then it must be as frustrating for you as it is for me that a lot of restaurants now have to cater to non-existent gluten allergies.
For instance, most restaurants know that nut alleries are real, and life threatening, so they go to great lengths to make sure there's no nuts in things they say are nut free. For gluten allergies, 99% of the people won't notice if they accidentally consume a crouton, so "gluten free" becomes "gluten free, but we aren't really that stringent about it cause nobody really cares."
We tend to find places that really know what they are doing and stick to them. If my wife asks a question and whoever she is talking to sounds even a little bit uncertain, she won't eat there. Going somewhere new always involves scouting and a "fingers crossed" experience while she's eating.
Checking on things like separate fryers gets old, so when a restaurant knows what they are talking about they get A LOT of repeat business from us. Fast food tends to be tougher when travelling but Chick-fil-a actually does a great job. Fries in a separate fryer, grilled nuggets and their salads are all safe.
We actually bought a used RV the past year for family trips because it makes it so much easier to just preload a travelling kitchen.
Vegan is a trend.
That being said, gluten-free reheated frozen food out of a bag is just a more expensive version of ordinary reheated frozen food out of a bag, so I don't think it would help these places very much.
Anyway. We avoid Applebee's and Buffalo Wild Wings. The food is terrible. Even if it was mediocre, it's overpriced. There are better restaurants at the same price, or lower.
> and at the same time they are spending outside their means
It amuses me to no end that we millenials are simultaneously criticized for not spending enough.
Nobody local every opens a chain and so they don't care about the community or food quality.
I try very hard to stick to locally owned restaurants but sometimes they're few and far between - especially in a college town like I live.
Lower-tier restaurants, e.g. McD's or even Domino's, probably have some immunity to this problem because the expectations are rather low.
As far as pizza goes, I've been known to eat the frozen stuff, so the big delivery chains are a huge step up.
I have also noticed when dining at more ethnic places (in my case, Viet pho), younger people are more common there.
Ditto for tapas - which some people my age don't seem to like because the portions are small.
So if millenials are to blame - to echo the sentiments of another commentor - for the de-mediocritization of American dining, then I will die a little happier.
Recently after years, I went to TGI Fridays. I was amused at how bad the food was in quality and nutritive value [1]. It was hard to find anything healthy to eat. Until a decade ago, going to TGIF or Applebees defined dining out, or chilling after work, in most of the US.
The food, once cautiously chosen for pain avoidance, costed $35 for two. I won't know enough to comment how America at large treats these chains, or even if they have the same cultural relevance they had in the 1990s, but I for one see their whimsical demise.