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from the employees-can't-afford-to-be-customers dept.
Casual dining is in danger — and millennials are to blame.
Brands such as TGI Fridays, Ruby Tuesday, and Applebee's have faced sales slumps and dozens of restaurant closures, as casual dining chains have struggled to attract customers and grow sales.
"Casual-dining restaurants face a uniquely challenging market today," Buffalo Wild Wings CEO Sally Smith recently wrote in a letter to shareholders.
According to Smith, these sit-down restaurants' struggles can blamed on the most-frequently besmirched generation: millennials.
"Millennial consumers are more attracted than their elders to cooking at home, ordering delivery from restaurants and eating quickly, in fast-casual or quick-serve restaurants," Smith wrote.
Millenials are too focused on food ordering apps and healthy cuisine.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Tuesday June 06 2017, @07:40AM (6 children)
Around here, it seems eating out is slightly growing - so I'm happy to extrapolate from anecdote into alternative fact and proclaim that this seems more a US problem than anything else.
I'm seriously curious: what's the status in countries that are not the USA?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 06 2017, @12:30PM (4 children)
In other countries, Buffalo Wild Wings an Applebee are dead for so long nobody knows what's about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 06 2017, @01:16PM (3 children)
Yet in China it's one of the only places you'll want to eat because you're most likely not to get an attack of dysentery from it.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 06 2017, @08:12PM (2 children)
That's a serious recommendation, not trolling. In places like China chain restaurants like TGIFriday's have better food handling practices and quality control. Native concepts of hygiene are not what they are in, say, Switzerland, and attempts at government regulation are easily subverted through guanxi (connections) and straight up bribery. Those are problems everywhere in the world, of course, but China's on the whole other end of the spectrum from Switzerland or Norway in that regard.
So while you might not want to eat at Applebee's in Canada, it is actually a place you would want to eat in a place like China.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @09:18PM
Is the Great Wall hard to get your wagon over? And is the land bridge to the American North West open?
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Thursday June 08 2017, @09:09AM
During my studies, I joined a study tour to China. Half of the students ended up sick for a few days.
It's not (necessarily) the lack of hygiene, though. It's the fact that the bacteria far from home are different, and your gut isn't used to that.
We were warned about tap water - not just not drinking it before boiling, but also not eating anything raw that has been exposed to tap water (e.g. no ice cubes in your drink).
Mistakes in this regard implied illness for a few days while your gut fends off new and exciting bacteria. The guts of locals are of course adapted to this, so they don't notice.
In some parts of Europe and the US, standards for e.g. tap water are more strict - but then again, in other parts you can expect lead in your tap water.
On the whole, when you're a continent away from home, you require far stricter hygienic standards than you do at home. So irrespective of the truth of this assertion, in China, you want to be careful with food.
And since typically, everything at fast-food chains (except the ice cubes and the salad) is exposed to bacteria-killing temperatures, that is relatively safe.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PocketSizeSUn on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:38PM
In the US the middle class is being destroyed. In Asia the middle class is still growing. Hence restaurants that cater to the middle class are dying. Why is this a surprise to anyone?
Some of these chains that have disappeared from the US landscape are redefined and booming in Asia.
IME these types of utter crap chains have never taken a serious foothold in most of Europe (or maybe I have a selective memory).