Man, we sure aren’t eating out more often. We’re in the process of getting screwed by the home real estate market, and expecting our first child. When she’s born, I’m going to quit my job.
Each of us eats a workday lunch out about once every two weeks. We go to a restaurant together about as often. We really like two-for-one appetizers night at the local brewpub, for that.
I eat out probably twice a month. I have coffee out more often than that. My husband picks up dinner for himself maybe once a week.
We used to eat out a lot more but for the last year or so we’ve been trying to save money and I’ve been trying to lose weight, and it’s pretty obvious that eating out is not good for either of those goals.
When I was a kid we ate out a few times a year, usually at a Horn & Hardart cafeteria. When my wife and I were raising our kids we usually went to a dim sum restaurant every Sunday at noon and occasionally ate out somewhere else. Now we eat out about once a week, usually at an Indian or Chinese restaurant or for sushi if we’re feeling flush. Until my wife retired we would, if she was exceptionally busy, pick up a sub at the local Dagwood’s (its real name). Or I would cook. Yes, I can. When I spent 6 weeks by myself in Sydney, I cooked most of my meals (for one!) myself. It was faster (not to mention cheaper) than eating out. Mostly I did stir-fry. Took a half hour to cook the rice and in that half hour I prepared the meat and veggies and stir fried them. Once I bought a whole octopus and it lasted several days. The first day, I learned that you have to claw the “teeth” off the suckers before you cook it or you would get them in your teeth. You live and learn, but cooking for one is not hard and needn’t be time-consuming.
Now my son has four kids (aged 9, 11, 13, 15), all heavily involved in activities, no two of whom are home for dinner at the same time and whom they have to chauffer all around town. They order in most nights. I can understand that. His wife doesn’t work, but coordinating all this is practically a full-time job.
Of my other two children, each with one child, one of them eats out or orders in a lot. His wife works (she is a doctor) but they have a live-in mother-in-law and I don’t understand why she does cook more. But not for me to ask. My daughter and her husband both work (they use a day-care), but nonetheless one or the other will make dinner most nights. They are both excellent cooks. They do order in once or twice a week when life gets too hectic. Rarely fast food (an occasional pizza).
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Is this actually true? I have quite a few friends in the restaurant biz and all of them tell me their places have been half empty in the last year or two, compared to years prior. My assumption was the economy is so bad that people can’t afford to dine out as frequently as they used to.
I don’t have a citation (not the OP here), but I suspect that your friends run places more expensive than McDonald’s. Cheap fast food places where I live have longer lines than ever. But yes, people are avoiding nicer sit-down places.
Geez, I feel like an oddball!
We eat out probably only 4 times per year. Those are for only special occasions, like birthdays, and our anniversary. There are just three of us. My husband, our daughter, and myself.
I don’t work outside the home, so I have all the time needed to make our meals at home. It’s better for us, not to mention how much money we save. I enjoy cooking, and my family enjoys eating what I cook, so, it’s a win-win type thing, I suppose.
Well, my SO’s hobby is eating out - the more upscale the restaurant, the better. I swear if he had the income he’d have a personal chef and a team of waiters. As we’re watching the bank account a bit more lately, I’ve kept us down to once a week, and we don’t drive 40 miles to Nashville as much as we used to to go to the better establishments. That, however, is more a function of hanging onto our aging car for a while, before we get a new one next year.
For those of you who live in the NYC area, I understand (mostly from Seinfeld reruns) that there’s lots of eateries right at hand, but with the cost of living there, wouldn’t it be advantageous to be as economical as possible? Even with tiny kitchens, you could save boku by using a crockpot or making stew for two - surely you have a stovetop? Or is takeout from the Chinese joint from the street level cheaper per unit than stew fixings from the grocery store? I’m not criticizing, just curious.
Missed the edit. I did see HelloAgain’s comments on cost, just wondering if this is true across the board (and for most foodstuffs).
What does “I don’t do leftovers” mean? That you won’t reheat food or you never have any leftover food? I don’t understand why someone wouldn’t eat leftovers. I do understand that it’s difficult to cook for one, though, but a couple cheeseburgers and diet coke every day? Ugh.
It’s 'cause my sink is full of dirty dishes.
Had a thing. Also, can’t cook for shit.
I eat out a minimum of 10 times a week. Typically, if I eat at home, it’s (1) a TV dinner, (2) because I’m visiting my mother or in-laws, or (3) because my wife is feeling adventurous.
I didn’t live in New York, but in Philadelphia… but it’s not just about the cost. Yeah, the chinese place around the corner is probably cheaper than assembling all the ingredients and putting it together, but not all ordering in is. The big thing for us was that it wasn’t quite expensive enough to seem like a bad deal, and it’s just SO easy. I mean, most of our ordering my last year of grad school was done on the internet- chinese, pizza, real italian, homestyle, soul food, thai, you name it, we could order it online and have it delivered right to our door. And it was good!
Yeah, we did spend a lot of money on food during that period, but we spend a lot of money on food when we cook, too. And you can get delivery options that are cheap, especially at places where the portion sizes mean you get like, four meals out of a lo mein container. But the convenience for decent food makes it a REALLY attractive habit to get into if you’re willing and able to spend the money on it.
We’re not doing it now because we live in the suburbs and have a mortgage, but back then, with two incomes (even if mine wasn’t huge) and a cheap one bedroom apartment, we could afford to eat out a lot and still put money into savings. We didn’t do it for very long, but during high-stress, busy periods, it’s hard to resist.
[QUOTE=even sven]
Smaller family sizes makes it more economical, and busy
schedules make it more attractive. Really, it’s just about specialization of
labor- there was a time when we did all of our household tasks, from canning
to mixing up shoeshine, at home. As society has developed, we’ve delegated
more and more of those tasks to professionals so that we can focus on our
own specialized labor. Why have 50 amateur cooks each going through the
whole process when one professional cook can serve them all much more
efficiently and do a better job of it?
[/quote]
Seconding this. As a rather extravagant example, consider the economics of
baking your own bread from scratch, versus buying a few loaves from a
commercial baker who has access to larger ovens, more efficient dough
mixers, not to mention bulk rates on flour and other ingredients.
A related issue is the energy savings of consolidating in one place (e.g., a
restaurant) the activities of storing, preparing, and consuming food. If 25
families of 4 people each wanted to feed themselves by cooking at home, that
involves at least 25 additional round-trips to transport unprocessed
foodstuffs from the market to the individual household kitchens. A
commercial kitchen, by contrast, only needs one large delivery from each
local farm or regional distributor to feed the same number of people. if
each family drives to and from the restaurant, that of course offsets the
discrepancy between the two feeding operations, but the point is their cars
aren’t laden with bags and bags of unprocessed food, cleaning supplies, and
dinky kitchen equipment on each trip.
These same 25 families draw an excessive amount of water, gas, and
electricity by using and washing their individual collections of small pots
and pans, while the large restaurant kitchen can achieve economies of scale
with its industrial-sized equipment and labor-saving devices, most of which
are impractical for the individual family to purchase.
In the absence of bulk buying clubs or community kitchens, therefore, eating
out constitutes a very attractive option for families looking to feed
themselves efficiently. If by doing so they feel they would surrender
control over the purchasing decisions, the labor practices supported,
or the style of cooking employed, then they’re free to try achieving similar
economies of scale by forming a community kitchen or partnering with
their neighbors to buy staples in bulk and share in the process of preparing
meals for the neighborhood.
You appear to be missing the point that you have to travel from home to the restaurant(s) more often than you’d have to travel from home to the grocery store.
We hardly ever eat out, mostly because we hate to spend the money on it. We’ll go out to dinner a few times a year, for birthdays & anniversaries, and occasionally with my parents, who like to eat out a lot. We also will stop for fast food if we’re on a road trip, but that’s a special treat for the kids. Other than that, I plan a weekly menu, do grocery shopping once a week, and my husband makes his lunch for work. I’m a stay at home mother now, but I’ll be returning to work (fingers crossed) when school starts next year. I hope we have established enough of a habit that we can continue eating homecooked stuff, but we’ll see how that goes with our increasingly hectic schedule.
I never have leftover food. I hate leftovers. I deliberately plan not to have them
Cheeseburgers are great (they’re not the ONLY thing I eat, chicken and fish sandwiches are also great). The way you feel about cheeseburgers is the way I feel about leftovers. UGH! They’re gross.
I’m guessing you must not possess an ideal body mass index.
I think part of it is a rebellion against the austerity most North Americans reflexively went into at the start of the recession. Lots of people went into savings mode as a hedge against disaster.
Unfortunately, North Americans being pretty spoiled and inclined to be frivolous, this takes a toll on the psyche. While lots of us aren’t to the point yet of racking up massive debts with giant TVs and cars and homes we can’t afford, a little indulgence like a nice meal out seems an acceptable way to remind ourselves we’re not Ma and Pa Joad.
Every, single day, unless I don’t have a lunch partner, for lunch. For many reasons, I won’t eat in the company cafeteria (despite it being free to me), and no one is allowed coffee pots, microwaves, refrigerators, and so on, so that means brown-bagging is out (I sneak in a PB&J for breakfast, though). Back home, though, I think the only time I go out is when a vendor invites me.
As a family, though, we make it a point to go out once per week, and we’ve done that forever. Sit down fare, never fast food, although we have a lot of variety. It can be the cheapest of the very cheap (coney islands), or cheap fake chain stuff (Chilis and its clones), sports bars and grills (mostly local, or BW3’s), somewhat cheapy chains (Olive Garden, Red Lobster), to the more expensive, non-chain, casual-style restaurants (like Olive Garden or Red Lobster that isn’t a chain and isn’t so formulaic). We don’t intentionally go to expensive places, though, but sometimes it’s a surprise.
(Although, Michigan apparently has one of those property-rights violating anti-smoking laws now, and if I can’t enjoy my Romeo & Juliet or Te Amo any more, I’ll be a lot less inclined to go out when I finally get back home. Hope my wife will understand that.)
While I’ve read enough of rachellelogram’s posts to know this is the case, I don’t see the connection. I know a lot of people who only eat fast food–usually $1 hamburgers and a diet drink–and they are not overweight at all. I, who am obese, ate out at most once a week, and it was always at sit down restaurants with buffets–fast food is nothing compared to that.