"We can't justify a £52 lunch" - AIBU to think you didn't need to?

[PropitiousJump]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg3g11z6d8o

I found this article irritating. Middle earning families complaining they can't afford a day out, in part because of the expense of eating lunch and dinner out. A family of four in both cases.

I completely agree it's got expensive to eat out, but have they never heard of taking your own sandwiches?

And if you look at what they've eaten, they've ordered a lot of extras that have bumped up the bill.

Costa family - £52 lunch for four. If they could have done without an overpriced bag of crisps on top of their mains, and not had puddings (this was lunch, not dinner) they could have got the bill down to a more reasonable £40ish - a tenner each.

Pizza Express family - £174 dinner for four. If they cut out the starter and side orders and the adults had soft drinks instead of alcohol, they could have got the bill down to approx £109 for soft drinks, mains and a dessert each.

This isn't saying they are eating too much - it's not a diet-bashing thread - but common sense says that if you are eating in a chain place on a day out and trying to keep costs down, you don't order loads of extras and alcohol. Have a drink and a snack at home if you're still hungry. Save all the extras for an 'occasion' where eating out is the focus of the event and you're going somewhere special, not fuelling up in a chain restaurant.

AIBU?

Also so mumsnet: ‘I have to make do on a shoestring budget, so everyone else should have to, and want to, as well’.

I’m very selective in where I eat out. Usually independent restaurants or small chains (ie less than 10 in an area) as most restaurants are samey samey boring food or heated up in the microwave job.

When the weather is nice yes, I get the point of taking your own food. Having spent a miserable lunchtime eating a packed lunch at a family attraction in their indoor picnic area, that was freezing cold and wet because of the rain then I swore we’d never do it in bad weather.

I agree with you.

It doesn’t. I had a wine I particularly enjoyed when we ate out recently. It was £11 a glass. I bought some when we returned home - £117 for 12 bottles. Now being generous there’s three large glasses in a bottle which makes the restaurant price £33 a bottle, the retail price is £9.75 and the restaurant is obviously paying less. That’s one hell of a mark up.

What are you talking about? That isn't what I said. Oil is obviously becoming more expensive because its a limited resource and there are global issues.

It should have been a new paragraph after the question mark. But I still think it makes sense.

I watched the panaroma documentary, Panorama paid for their lunches so they obviously would have ordered more than perhaps they would have, maybe what they would have liked to have ordered to demonstrate the costs of items.

I mean, no one is taking a packed lunch to pizza express or costa, but you would as part of a day out probably. But thats not really the point of the documentary. It was about people not eating out as much and the decline of eating out due to the costs and the businesses explaining about the national insurance and wages increasing and having to try and balance passing on those costs but being affordable, which is going to be hard when people don't have alot of disposable income.

The famly did say if they went to costa they would let the kids eat and go without themselves if they chose to do that.

Yes as a higher rate tax payer my hobbies should be free and generate no work or income for any of the millions of people who earn less than me in this country. Fuck them, daring to think they could make a living selling goods and services that aren’t essential to keep a human alive. And when I don’t have a job because my work can’t afford to pay me as no one is buying the goods and services we provide? Well fuck me and fuck everyone who benefits from the 1000s I pay in tax every year. I’m sure it will be awesome! We can all sit around our communal turnip burning iPhones to keep warm and reminisce about yellow stickers and how we didn’t piss away our turnip money at Costa coffee.

LOL
There is no elephant in this room.

I think the article was trying to make the point you mentioned but completely missed the mark by taking all its readers for mugs.

In which reality would a small family of 4 order 11(!!!) separate plates of food? 15 plates if you include dessert. How did that all even fit on the table? Why did they refuse to order the kids menu which would have come with free drinks and desserts? Surely normal families with kids will always go for the childrens menu.

That has nothing to do with affordable luxuries, COL or lifestyle changes. It's basically a stunt that a bad Youtuber would do where they go into an establishment and deliberately order a huge amount of food they have no intention of eating in order to prove some kind of premeditated point.

I agree - we've been cutting back on days and meals out since covid due to rising costs and we do go for cheaper options.

Did meal out after awful week this weekend 3 of us - 2 adults and older teen - not a chain but a pub with restictive but reasonable prcied for city 3 buggers and fry 37.50 but one pint and two cokes on top and we were up to fifty quid. It was also 20 quid on buses to get there.

We didn't do much but wander rounds shops and be out. We could have eaten food at home or not gone as far - but the whole point was a treat because I needed something to help me put previous week behind me.

Pre covid there would have been five of us and we'd have done similar things for less more frequently and that despite an increase in income and two kids grown and not here most of the time so fewer people to pay for.

Everything gone up and up for years erroding our purchasing power - and frankly it's looking like another boat of inflation with higher prices is on the way again. So what can you do but cut any discretionary spending more which will impact on hospitality and entertainment sectors likely causing job losses in them eventually.

I agree too and the quality has gone down- massively.

Customers aren’t daft or are we supposed to partake in saturated overpriced crap just because?

With respect, you're still missing the point. Yes, the family in the article who went to Pizza Express obviously had a bit of a blow-out because someone else was footing the bill. But even so, the point remains the same that a meal for four at PE is significantly more expensive than it was three or even two years ago, and lots of people who aren't been funded by the BBC can no longer afford to go there.

And if people can't afford nice things, those things will cease to exist and then we'll have lots of people out of work, a massive benefits bill, and an even worse standard of living where we'll all have to live like H0sta, like it or not.

Indeed. Having spent 13 years studying while working full time, to achieve two professional qualifications. Working my arse off to reach a stable point in my career, paying higher rate tax for much of that time and funding all my higher education costs (and higher tax because Scotland), I should also need to think twice about having lunch out with my kids because it’s an unnecessary expense.

Except it is necessary to people working in those industries that someone is prepared to use those services.

All the drinks are hugely marked up in pubs and restaurants. Margins are still really low. If the drinks were closer to supermarket prices, they'd all go out of business, or have to charge even more for the food. But most go for a model of trying to keep the food affordable and charging more for the wine/alcohol.

With all the perspective of 'we are lucky to be able to pay the bills/not live in poverty/a war zone'...AND the importance of life is for living, I think the point is that for people on quite decent/above-average incomes (I don't mean people on 200k), things feel much harder than they did a decade ago.

In 2016 a lunch at Pizza Express would have felt like a bit of a treat, but not a big extravagance. Our income has increased somewhat over the past decade but not nearly as much as mortgage payments/bills and the overall cost of living has. So everything feels very tight now and there's hardly any disposable income to cover anything other than the essentials. We are also saving nothing.

This month we tipped into overdraft for the first time in many many years, just because we had an unexpected expense and couldn't cover it. It feels quite shit tbh. Again, I know there are far worse things but it's not the place I expected to be at this age and stage of life!

My teenage kids can't get Saturday/evening jobs because all those jobs you used to be able to get in pubs/restaurants/shops don't exist any more. Everywhere is making 'efficiencies' (which in reality means not hiring people, and cutting down the hours of people who do work for them). This is also why we're stuck with bloody self-pay checkouts. It's a lot cheaper.

We last did pizza express nearly 2 and half years ago - treat as we were all missing eldest. It was noisy servcie was poor and the bill was huge for what we got so avoided ever since.

The one we went to closed about 6 months ago. Many of the other food places are still doing well enough but everyone we know is eating out less.

I think the hospitallity sector and entertainment sectors will be contracting and there will be a rise in unemployment.

Obviously, I realise that but a 300% mark up (assuming they pay around £8) on a bottle of wine does seem a tad excessive!

Would you rather they charge for the drinks and the table separately?

you know that stuff is cheap especially soft chemical drinks
you know that building costs - rent or mortgage- are out of control but still need to be paid

Agree entirely. £52 for processed slop.

I draw the line at eating out twice in a day.

Happy with sandwiches. Then buy an ice cream as a treat.

Even on holiday?

They didn’t eat out twice in one day, it was two different families eating in two different places.

Clearly yes! But it was more of a rhetorical question in agreement.

For me it was the fact that they had food out and then an activity. I would do one or the other, not necessarily for financial reasons but because it is two seperate treats that could be done on two seperate days. So dinner out OR bowling and most people I know are the same.