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Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

Millennials are simultaneously not buying houses because we spend too much eating out (http://time.com/money/4778942/avocados-millennials-home-buyi...) and killing off chains by not eating out enough. At some point businesses need to stop blaming everything on the "millennials" bogeyman and accept responsibility for not adapting to modern trends.

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.

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I honestly hope that more people have the same attitude as you. I really think one of the major problems with America is that we don't really question what we are being sold and is it worth it. Too long have major corporations given us horrible choices for what we buy etc. and if the "millennial generation" is to blame for corporations suddenly realizing their cheapness and lack of caring in what they sell through financial difficulties, then bravo to them. I will do whatever I can to support my younger brethren in "helping" the organizations realize their time of taking advantage of people by offering the cheapest and worst option possible has come to an end.

The other thing the article ignores is that chains like Applebees have been getting worse over time. My family used to go to the local Applebees all the time in the late 1990s. In 2000, they had a major menu change. The food became much worse, and we stopped going there.

Yep. Our Applebees put in self-serve payment stations recently and the level of service went down precipitously. Servers know the computer will force 20% tip on the diner regardless of the quality of service. People are too lazy to reduce the tip appropriately.

I don't think that it's laziness that makes people not reduce the tip. I think that, somehow, when there is a default that becomes a kind of anchor and going below that is seen as ruder than it would have been if the customer was able to choose their own tip% independent of a suggestion.

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.

Tip anchoring really makes me angry. It's manipulative.

If you look at tips as a cost sharing mechanism that allows the restaurant to push some of its personnel costs onto customers, it's irrational to be angry about this, just like it would be irrational to be upset about a 10% increase on the menu prices. If the food isn't worth it (spoiler: it isn't), eat elsewhere.

Further, to the degree that tip anchoring reduces tipping variance, the anchoring should actually make the system work better overall.

> Further, to the degree that tip anchoring reduces tipping variance.

Does it do that at all? I would suspect that it increases the mean but also the variance.

That's a good question. My intuition is that it would decrease the variance as people would be drawn towards the anchor. But I could be wrong. We'd need empirical data to know. There is public data available on credit card purchases in NYC cabs. That will just give you the data for payments with the anchor though, not the cash payments made without it.

> My intuition is that it would decrease the variance as people would be drawn towards the anchor.

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.

Ya, that makes sense. Could go either way. Def one of those "not gonna know without looking at the data" situations.

> and killing off chains by not eating out enough.

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.

Also these places aren't good at the things they (sometimes) claim to specialize in. The wings at Buffalo Wild Wings are not better than the wings at a random bar.

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?

They're worse. They get in the lowest grade wings possible (sometimes they're the size of pigeon wings) and cook as industrial as possible.

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

With coupons, you can get a large pizza from Domino's or Pizza Hutt for $7-9 including tax.

"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.

I used to be a heavy user of delivery pizza until those delivery fees started going up. I could be completely over blowing this issue, but somehow that tacking on of that fee on the end really gets to me. If you're trying to hide the cost of increasing the price of the pizzas, just increase the price already. Are used to be a heavy user of delivery pizza until those delivery fees started going up. I could be completely over blowing this issue, but somehow that tacking on of that fee on the end really gets to me. If you're trying to hide the cost of increasing the price of the pizzas, just increase the price already. That three dollar fee I don't mind if it's part of the pizza, it's the fact that it's an extra fee that feels wrong and disrespectful to me as the customer. That three dollar fee I don't mind if it's part of the pizza, it's the fact that it's an extra fee that feels wrong and disrespectful to me as the customer

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