So this weekend I went to a con and I was really excited to have dinner with some friends that I only see once every few months. We hadn’t settled on a place, but I had made it clear that I couldn’t spend a lot of money, and they seemed to be fine with that, two of them being fans of run-down diners. Right before we were to go, however, they said that the dinner plans had been finalized for a non-sushi* place in the $10-$15/plate range. I was pretty upset and declined dinner, then spent the rest of the day being mad because of a perceived ditch–their tony dinner was seen as more important than spending time with me. And then feeling guilty, because I placed my desire not to want to cut my budget in other areas over my desire to spend time with them (being a miser). Basically it was not a fun trip.
Now, I make considerably less than these friends (I’d say around 20k less) and as a result have to watch my spending more than them. Was it rude for them to pick a place so far out of my price bracket? Was it rude for me to decline, after we had spent so much time being excited about getting together? Looking back, I probably could have spared an extra ten dollars to see my friends, but I was upset that they had chosen that restaurant at all, especially when they had earlier seemed to acknowledge my financial limitations.
So, their fault or mine? Or nobody’s? Were they just being oblivious or were they trying to ditch me? And how do you well-off people deal with your poor friends?
*Sushi is the only food I will pay those prices for, though obviously, not that often.
Maybe they didn’t realize 10-15 a plate was out of your range? I wouldn’t necessarily see that as being expensive. If they’d gone $20 or up, then that’s rude. Did you tell them that it was out of your price range? Because, honestly, I can see myself doing that with absolutely no malice, just not realizing it was too much.
I’d be pretty pissed if someone did this to me, but I’d write it off to selfishness and not them trying to “ditch”. Not that selfishness is an better. I get pretty pissed when people pull shit like that.
They may have been a bit oblivious, but it’s possible you could have been more clear.
Did you say “I can’t spend a lot of money” or “I can’t spend more than $5 on dinner”? I don’t think of $10-$15 a plate as being a “tony” price, frankly – it’s not super cheap, but it doesn’t trigger my “expensive” radar.
Once they said where they were going, did you just say, “I’m out,” or did you say, “Oh, I’m sorry. That’s outside my price range – I was hoping not to spend more than $5. That restaurant isn’t in my budget – any chance we could go to Greasy Spoon instead?”
Given the info you provide, I’d say it’s a round of bad communication and missed opportunities all around.
I’m far from rich, but I don’t think $10-$15 is an expensive dinner. That’s what you’ll pay at a number of chains, like Outback or Red Lobster. A good portion of the menu at Chilis falls in that range too, though you can go cheaper.
I think it was pretty cheap to decline going out to dinner based on that. How low (in price) did you expect them to go? Even if they had decided on going to Denny’s, you probably would still have been out at least $6-$7 if you got a cheap meal and something to drink. That’s only a $3-$9 difference, since you were only paying for yourself I don’t see what the big deal is.
I said it was too expensive for me. The friend who told me looked kind of sad but didn’t offer to change the venue.
$9 is a lot of money for some people. Frankly I am a little surprised that there are people who would not raise an eyebrow at a $15 meal for a single person, that’s like “birthday dinner” in my family, a meal for special occasions only (of course, this might have counted as one, but I didn’t think so). To me, cheap means less than $10 and that includes tip. Seriously, what do all you people make that you can blow $15 on food?
There had been talk of going to Steak and Shake that night, but when I mentioned it one of my friends kind of laughed and said “oh yeah, we’ll go there.” I guess that the solution is to work out the place in advance and not just expect that “cheap”=“less than $10” in everyone’s minds. Or to not associate with the rich, hah.
Yup, count me in on thinking $10-$15/plate is a low-to-average price. You and your friends obviously have different ideas of what a cheap dinner is. If someone told me that they needed to go to an inexpensive place for dinner, I’d probably choose someplace in this range.
More importantly: Where in the world do you get Sushi for $10-$15?!? Sushi dinners always end up costing me about $30/plate…
I don’t think the choice of restaurant was out of line, either. $10-$15 per plate is not a posh place, and if that’s the entree price range there are definitely going to be low-dollar options. If I had been in your situation, and I have on many occasions, I would have gone along and just ordered a side salad or an appetizer and drank water. You could always have stopped at McDonalds afterwards on your own.
10-15 dollars is very cheap in my estimation. It’s the average price of a dish at a reasonably nice ethnic restaurant (one that doesn’t have a “C” health grade). “Below 10 with tip” is about what you pay for fast food these days…and I don’t eat fast food.
The only reasonably edible & tasty food I can think of that would be under 10$ and edible would have been the myriad hole-in-the-wall Chinese/Korean places around where I went to school in Illinois and their prices most likely had a lot to do with the fact that their overhead was significantly lower because we all lived in the middle of nowhere, but the school had a huge Asian population that would patronise their restaurants. I have never seen this situation anywhere else.
Steak and Shake. Denny’s. Eat 'n Park. Lots of gyro places. Family restaurants where the employees don’t wear flair. I usually eat out once a week and my boyfriend and I never spend more than around $12 combined. Not necessarily cheapness, just a taste for the less refined. (Right now I am on a gyro kick, that is all I want to eat, and you can get a kick-ass gyro here for less than $5.)
There are lots of places in Pittsburgh where you can get full up on sushi for less than $20. [pgh specific] Sushi Boat and Oishii in Oakland, that other place in South Oakland next to the Mad Mex. If you have a car, Oriental Super Buffet in the North Hills has all you can eat sushi for $11, though it is buffet grade. [/pgh specific] Granted, it is not high-end sushi, but I’ve had high-end sushi and honestly I think all sushi is equally awesome.
But since it seems the consensus is that I was wrong I’ll have to invite them to Applebees or some similar overpriced chain restaurant to make up for it.
I’m a college student who works my butt off for my $9.50 an hour and I don’t think $10 for dinner is anything at all. None of my friends would bat an eyelash at that either.
We all generally go out once a week or so to a place that is $10-$20 (think Applebees or Chillis or some place where you can either get a burger for $10 or a steak for $20) and I can’t say that it’s ever crossed my mind that that is expensive.
In fact, if it was our “night out” and a friend suggested that we were out of line for suggesting somewhere that is $10, I’d tell the friend sorry, but we didn’t exactly feel like going to McDonald’s tonight (which, by the way, can easily run you $7).
$10 isn’t that much money- you can probably find it in change around your house. Either you are MUCH poorer then you say (IE making half of what you claim), horribly managing your finances, or just being cheap. None of that would be the fault of your friends, who wanted to go somewhere slightly more special then Burger King.
I notice I lot of the people who think $10-15 isn’t all that expensive are from California. What counts as “expensive” when it comes to food, housing, etc. can really vary from place to place.
Personally, if a friend told me they couldn’t spend a lot of money for dinner, I’d pick a place where there was at least something available for less than $10. Either that, or I’d treat them.
While I’m going to agree that, for me, $10-15 isn’t an expensive dinner, I think that at least part of the problem lies with your friends’ reactions. If a friend of mine, on hearing what restaurant had been picked, said “Dang. I’m sorry, but I can’t afford to eat there”, I’d bend over backwards to find a restaurant that we could all afford and enjoy. McDonalds (blech) with friends is better then leaving someone out.
Sounds like an unfortunate situation all-around. Unfortunately, I’ll have to agree with the others who say that $10-15 per dinner doesn’t seem very expensive, especially for a “special event” like getting together with friends who don’t see each other very often.
That said, if I were the “poor” one, I’d like to say I’d just suck it up and go, but it would depend on how skint I was feeling at the time.
On the flip side, if I were one of the friends (who knew you had price limitations), I would have offered to buy your dinner.
I’ve been on both sides of the divide. Up until a rather expensive equipment failure this February that set me back a couple kilobucks I wasn’t budgeted for, I would drop $50, $70, $90 for a good meal about 6 times a month, and when my friends said “we need to eat cheap” I would sometimes forget that a $25/plate establishment might not quality as cheap. (Even now I’ll do $10-$15 pretty casually).
But it hasn’t exactly been an archeological eon since I had to make $15/day stretch for all expenditures except rent, transportation, and the electric bill. Breakfast, lunch, supper, beer, movies, online services, it all came out of that.
I think it’s just really easy to forget that not everyone has the resources that you currently enjoy. I’d mark it up as “oblivious” rather than “deliberate” or “uncaring”.
Yeah, Pittsburgh is a pretty cheap city. Like I make 20k a year before taxes and I can live comfortably here, whereas in NYC I’d be a pauper.
Then again I am also a pretty cheap person and not too discriminating of taste. I barely have a sense of taste at all. So to me, $15/plate IS a waste. Food equals fuel to me. But I admit that I was partially in the wrong so maybe I will take them to this bar my Pgh friends sometimes go to that is semi-upscale and hope it will appeal to them. I don’t like it when people pay for my dinner though so I wouldn’t have accepted that even if they’d offered.
I agree that this sounds like miscommunication all around, with just a dash of insensitivity from the other friends. I don’t currently think of $10-15 as a very expensive meal, but ten years ago I did. In either event, I agree with those who seem to feel that it would be better to eat burgers with friends than surf & turf without.