"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?

No just expect to stop living like the Kardashians when on a very basic wage.

You can’t.

I think it’s just that everything now is so expensive. I definitely want to feel ‘bang for buck’ and am probably more selective about how and where I choose to spend my money these days.

We have a very healthy income but have stopped regularly eating out as a family of four - mainly because it’s so painful to see our 8 and 6 year old waste food, or, worse, spend a lot of money on fairly mediocre food that is not as good as something I’d make at home.

We went out to a lovely local pub recently for Sunday lunch but it was the first time for a while and I must say that I baulked at paying £120 for a fairly nice but very ordinary meal, much of which was left by the kids. 3 mains, 3 puddings and 4 drinks, one of which was a beer. That didn’t feel like good value to me.

That said, I’m happy to pay approx £55 for the four of us to have a special ‘treat’ lunch out at Itsu as we all love sushi and I know the kids will eat it. That feels like good value, even though nominally it is more expensive than say McDonalds (which we do very occasionally have on long car journeys!)

But everything is so expensive now; that’s the frustration. I always hover by the discount shelves in the supermarket as I am keen on finding good quality bargains; free range meat, fish, and then pop it in the freezer.

Quite. I'm also from a very middle class family (father a dentist, mum a part-time dentist). My mum didn't work until we were all in secondary school but we lived in a big five bed house and all three kids were sent to private school.

No we didn't eat out as much as people do now - it wasn't such a 'thing' before the '90s, which is when the UK fully transitioned to a services-based economy, although my parents had endless dinner parties which I suspect was more fashionable then than it is now - but my parents were certainly a lot more well off than I am! And I'm also in a professional job and work full-time. It's just a weird form of denial that people seem to be trying to make out that the middle classes would be rich again if they didn't spend all their money on American Hots and Amazon tat.

I’d love to go back to the 80s full stop . Was a much better time to raise kids and teens in, so far away from the maelstrom of consumerism we live in now.

I regularly wish the internet and mobile phones had never been invented. But that genie isn't going back into the bottle!

I know.

Phones and social
media make parents think they need to provide all this. They don’t.

Who is expecting to live like the Kardashians?

Wanting to be able to have a basic lunch out with the family sometimes - and Pizza Express these days is probably the modern equivalent of the BHS cafe - is hardly wanting the moon on a stick.

We love a day out but we always bring a picnic and we have frozen pizza or something else quick and easy when we get home.

Some families had two wages coming in, but it wasn’t nearly as widespread as now.

The real point is that for many families there could be one breadwinner and they could still run a home and life for a family. And not just the middle classes, quite a few working class people did that too and without having to receive a penny of benefits other than child benefit. .

There’s no way that could happen now. Most families have two parents working full time and still can’t afford a very modest meal out in a bog standard chain cafe.

The difference was the balance between wages and cost of living was quite different to now. Nowadays wages have stagnated so much that people’s spending power has diminished significantly

That is a worse situation, in terms of the economy as a whole.

Wanting to order that amount of food on overpriced outlets on the same day you go to an expensive attraction regularly is. A treat a coiple
of times a year is way more realistic.

I do wonder if kids will do better not being able to expect all this regularly. Smaller presents, less tat, less experiences- more making do and amusing themselves, less expectations and consumerism, less shit overpriced food.

I know right? People are falling over themselves to blame this family for daring to have a costa and a game of bowling on the same day and not getting angry at the corporates and the employers who are charging too much and underpaying their staff so that this isn’t doable. The rich really have done one on the wider population havent they..?

This. We earn £120k combined and are having to make cutbacks. We definitely don’t live the high life, we live a pretty average life and to be honest we shouldn’t have to.

I know you didn’t comment on this but it also irritates me that the free childcare hours and tax free childcare ends if one partner earns £100k. It sounds like a lot of money, and it is compared to a lot of people, but not after £1500 (for one child) a month, plus mortgage and bills. With costs rising and rising these thresholds should too.

A lot of the ‘woe me’rs’ will say ohh how can you complain when you earn that much money. Because the lifestyle you SHOULD be able to live on that much money is very far from the lifestyle in the current climate in which we are only being able to make ends meet with 2 children (costing £3000 a month in childcare) and go out for a meal or two a month.

I do genuinely feel for single people on NMW or anything below £45k because in the current climate it must be miserable

I do think this shows the growing income disparity between the 1% and the rest of us.

costs have gone up but wages haven’t.

energy which underpins everything is helping fuel price rises making what used to be affordable unaffordable, while the 1% horde everything.

I think regular is being interpreted very differently by different people. Some thinking it meant weekly, others a monthly pay day treat. I took it to mean for birthdays and the odd holiday treat which is more like 4 to 6 times a year. I took it to mean that on the basis they were struggling to find reasons to justify it so were sticking to free stuff and I thought that meant a birthday or summer holiday outing didnt justify it anymore. It doesnt say that. But it is interesting how different people interpret the same word.

It said they’d changed to just doing it for special
occasions which is what many on that wage were doing anyway.

Also said the service industry had only fallen 2.7% hardly the falling of a cliff some are describing.

Really poor journalism .

Not in my parents' case - both very anti-smoking - my dad's parents had smoked (1940s onwards) and it completely put him off the habit.

Drinking - dad made his own foul wine from anything fermentable in his allotment, which we'd have within Sunday dinner year round. Other than that, just a sherry at Christmas and New Year type thing. They were not pub-goers at all.

You’re getting £6.5k after tax. Do explain how you’re struggling on that. 🤔

The £3k per month childcare probably goes a long way to answering that question!

Less people eating out = food establishments closing, so more unemployed people. More unemployed people that can't afford to eat out, so the it goes on and on.

This is not a good thing.

I think you are being unreasonable in that if its a day out & a treat that the whole idea is to splurge and make it special hence the extras/dessert

The costs to eat out now are very high so on top of petrol, entrance tickets etc, it really adds up.

you are not unreasonable in that taking your own lunch/not having the extras makes it more affordable but the whole point is to highlight how much more everything is so you would compare apples with apples and not pears

So no savings for nursery on the £120k before kids then. Nursery fees are temporary.When people decide to have children they really need to factor in that somebody will have to look after them which brings a cost.

and what happens to all the people who were working in the other 3 cafes, chicken shops, nail bars etc? Where are they supposed to work, if half of every single retail/hospitality/beauty industry, not just in their local area, but in the whole country, shut down? What jobs do you suggest they move to? Call center jobs, which are being decimated by AI? Basic admin jobs, ditto.

They also talk as if people haven't been packing picnics since the dark ages. What about all the poor businesses back then? The inns! They'll all go under! Who will pay the wenches and the scullery cooks?!

If it's outside of your means, then you either borrow, or you make do. And my family make do. We don't feel hard done by or that it's "mean" to deprive them of a £170 meal at Pizza Express for goodness sake!

So we just keep shitty outlets that nobody wants and which decimate health open.

Do we really want to get to the stage where the only people who can have children are the 1% or those completely reliant on benefits?

If we go back to the 70s / 80s that you seem so fond of, children were much more affordable because families could live on a single, average wage.