What will happen to restaurants / cafes

[LaCouleurDeMonCiel]

Pre Covid / COL increase we would eat out as a family 1-2 a week. Eating out would often be spontaneous, places like Bills, Rosas Thai, pizzeria, etc. when we passed one while shopping or because we didn’t fancy cooking.

Now we have stopped the spontaneous meals because the prices are ridiculous. We still go out when we want to go to a specific restaurant or celebrate something but we don’t visit the casual low/mid range places because £100+ is too expensive for a quick ‘not that special’ meal.

Are we the only ones?
Will we see a change in the type of restaurants on the high streets? High end restaurants + cheap fast food ones but nothing in between?

"Dog-ridden places" made me laugh! It's the Lake District, you maybe should have gone somewhere with less outdoor space if you have such an aversion to them! 😂

@LaCouleurDeMonCiel true. There are a few pubs near me that change staff and management regularly. And there's one, owned by an independent brewery, that has had the same management since they opened 4 years ago. The staff are mainly the same too. Some come and go for uni etc. But the core staff are the same. It's the one I go to as I now know them, they knowme. And i don't go weekly. It's thriving. Unlike the others.

Slightly off topic but you say the gov are not doing enough but do we want them to do something? Assuming it will be subsidising restaurants/shops etc it means we will all pay money to help all businesses instead of individually choosing which ones we want to help.
As much as some aspects of a changing high street saddens me, I don’t see the point in artificially keeping places in business when their business model is no longer working.

It occurs to me that if I can't be bothered to make a cup of tea/coffee at home, I have a choice:
Pay for someone riding an illegally altered e-bike to deliver a cup of lukewarm brown liquid.
Go into town and pay an equally extortionate price for a tea-bag dumped in a cup of tepid water or fancy coffee.
Drive to the nearest lay-by and buy a £2 mug of tea or coffee and enjoy the hedgerow decorations flung out of the windows of passing vehicles.

I think I'll put the kettle on.

Maybe true for the big chains with billionaire tax avoiding hedge fund owners. But rest assured, local independents are hanging on for their very existence. I do the accounts/VAT returns for our village cafe and the two partners aren't even making minimum wage at the moment and WILL have to close down if things don't improve soon as they'd literally be better off stacking shelves in Tesco! They're certainly not "wringing their customers dry"!

Went into an independent cafe the other week with Dh that was inside another big shop situated in a retail park. There were four people in there.
The lady cooking was on her own and although she said ' five minutes' after ten we hadn't even ordered.
It wasn't her fault , but we walked out
Saved us a tenner or whatever, but lost them two customers.
I've found that service is almost non existent these days and the food isn't great , so I think people are just preferring to make their own hot drinks / snacks and places don't have enough staff to make it a pleasant experience.

Yes unfortunately a lot of small businesses have been badly hit by increasing rent, utilities costs and inflation whilst simultaneously customers are tightening their belts - both metaphorically and actually.

DH has had his hair cut at a cheap barbers for years, she has now closed down as she told him with all the increases in cost, she would make a lot more working at Tescos on minimum wage.

It's the same for a lot of these cafes and small restaurants, particularly if they don't have the margins on selling alcohol to boost their takings.

You do realise that entire industries are subsidised by taxpayers and wouldn't exist in the UK otherwise, i.e. the steel industry, car production, etc. Do you want them to close down too??

It'll cost the taxpayer a hell of a lot more to deal with the consequences of even more small businesses closing down, i.e. empty/derelict shops that spread like a cancer through town centres, causing increases in anti social behaviour which costs in terms of policing, justice, repairs/restoration, etc., reduction in council parking revenue, unemployment, loss of tax revenue from the independent businesses (VAT, income tax, NIC, business rates, etc). Fewer small outlets means less trade for local ancillary services such as tradesmen, professional services, banks, etc.

The closure of smaller/independents drives custom to supermarkets and retail parks and online shopping, with profits going to billionaire hedge funds based abroad in tax havens rather than kept circulating in the local community.

It seems bars are suffering more. Before covid I loved a night out in town and would easily spend £100 or more on cocktails club entry and drinks taxi home etc.
Now I’m cutting out spending, so my night out is usually a restaurant meal and maybe one drink for £40.

We eat out a fair amount - almost entirely at independents. It's very rare that we get takeaway or eat in a chain, and we never get just coffee - we make coffee that at home if we want a drink. It started as lockdown eased when we'd get enough food in for four weekday lunches and then eat out on Friday. Our weekends are often bike rides with a cafe stop so we eat out then too. But we're both well paid and we don't have kids and the mortgage is paid off.

I think there is still a lot of money in the country. It's not always distributed fairly but there is a lot of families with money to spend. Whether people are renting not buying and not saving for a rainy day is another story but as far as treating themselves goes people don't seem to be holding back from what I can see.

I do have a great deal of sympathy for small independent businesses, they are feeling the brunt of all of this and this government doesn't seem to support SME businesses, hence why they're struggling.
The big conglomerates that are getting away with tax avoidance are just making things worse for us all.😑

I absolutely love dogs but I have to agree with the poster providing the review, I’d be mortified if I saw the person working there having their hand licked and then be handling food on the counter 🤢 not hygienic and a recipe for a bad tummy! Xx

Yeah I'm sorry but that's skanky and I would want to know. I get that allowing dogs at all introduces some hygiene risk element. But I'd assume choosing a dog friendly place meant I was accepting the risk of eg more dog hair or a toilet accident, not dog saliva on the food!

If you don’t use them they will close. Quite simple really. Same with high street shops. Pubs etc. There are a lot of people who like these things to be there but don’t want to use them. Perhaps we could just make fake facades and then no one would have to spend any money in them.

taxguru is speaking sense. Small businesses, whether they're cafes or pubs or independent delis/boutiques/bike repair shops, are what distinguishes one town or village and adds the individual sparkle. We're in between three small towns and it's those places that determine which I go to. The most convenient supermarket is in the least interesting town, and not by coincidence, that's the town that's struggling most with vacant shop fronts and low foot fall.

I think this is a bit facetious. Having a coffee out isn't really/entirely about not being 'bothered' to put the kettle on.

You might fancy a coffee while you're out shopping/doing something else.
It's a nice thing to do with friends.
It's a nice thing to do if you drink plain black coffee at home but occasionally feel like a frothy one, expertly made, a walk round the block to a cafe and a bit of banter with the barista (this is me).
It's a nice thing to do if you need twenty minutes to yourself to read/doodle/write/look at Twitter/stare out the window while surrounded by people but on your own.

IMO when you pay 'fancy coffee' prices you're paying for some or all of these things. Plus of course the staff wages, the shop's overheads and the materials costs.
Of course whether you can/want to pay for these things is a matter of circumstance and choice. But it isn't the case that the experience of putting the kettle on is the same as the experience of going to a cafe. That's a false equivalence.

Nothing has changed for us irrespective of the COL.

We never went to restaurants spontaneously.
The odd coffee, yes. However i won’t pay over £3 for a coffee now and if I’m absolutely desperate for some caffeine i will find a local cafe and steer clear of the huge chains.

Those places would go out of business if they didn’t allow dogs.

They won’t miss your custom and you are cutting your nose off to spite your face. Enjoy your extra money though.

Even a coffee and a sandwich which used to be my little treat in town once a week has almost doubled in price. Myself and a group of friends used to meet up for a bite to eat and a trip to the cinema once every few weeks, none of us can afford it now, we skip the meal and maybe see a film every couple of months. This is before all the new financial year price hikes for council tax, water, and whatever horrors the budget brings. Town is much quieter than it used to be, people are still out of course and we have a big student population but the buz has gone plus it all looks so shabby these days

All of this.

People are just so dense when it comes to the economy.

It is pretty obvious that in a 'cost of living crisis' as we are having, then discretionary spending will fall.
Everything has gone up, including petrol, interest rates (mortgages), shopping etc.
Therefore most people will have less money to spend on eating out / take aways gym membership, holidays, etc.
As regards the numerous food outlets that have proliferated my local high street in recent years, some will fail, some will continue, new ones will come along in time.
It gets dispiriting if lots of shops fail, as the overall footfall decreases, causing more failures, etc

I'm eating out more than ever! In fact, I've just got back from lunch at a cafe with a friend and also ate out Wednesday lunchtime at another cafe with different friends. Never chains, all independent.

I live on my own so only have to factor in myself, but, for example, both lunches out this week mean I don't cook or eat in the evening or have breakfast beforehand so it sort of balances out.

Lunch today was £8 for quiche, chips and a salad. Very large portion, I couldn't finish it all. Wednesday was an equally large Ploughman's for £9.

I'm out next week in the evening at a restaurant that does a special on Thursdays - any meal for £10 including a glass of wine (we're talking the likes of sea bass, steaks, seafood pasta, etc). Next weekend out again for a pub lunch. A couple of weeks ago, eight of us went to a Thai restaurant and the whole bill, including drinks and a 10% service charge, came to £130.

There's no way I could function if I skipped breakfast and dinner because I was having lunch out!

With restaurants that do these kind of offers, you have to wonder how sustainable it is. Considering how much overheads and ingredients costs have gone up by, I strongly suspect the answer is 'not very'. A couple of places near me have recently gone under after a phase of running various offers along these lines.

On the other hand, I rarely eat out because I’ve always felt it was a complete waste of money, same as going to the pub. I’ll meet friends for a coffee and chat but I won’t buy a lunch out. My friends don’t waste their money either.

Generally speaking, the only time we eat out as a family is on holiday when we’re staying in a hotel and you can’t cook your own meals and we’ll look for somewhere decent to eat.

We do live rurally and so there are no takeaway home delivery services nearby as the nearest town that might offer that is about 30 mins drive away. I’d probably buy an Indian takeaway occasionally if a good one was nearby, otherwise, I’ll buy supermarket pizzas for DS and his pals occasionally but they’re not very nice.

I’m definitely not saying I’m a great cook either, but why waste lots of money on mediocre meals? 🤷🏻‍♀️