Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
You can get a really good idea how the U.S. economy is doing by watching restaurants in your area. When the economy is booming, restaurant parking lots are full and chains are feverishly establishing new locations. But when the economy is struggling, restaurants get a lot less traffic and poor performing locations get shut down. Sadly, in 2024 it appears that a “restaurant apocalypse” has started to sweep across America. Most people have very little discretionary income to spend as a result of our cost of living crisis, and that is particularly true for our young adults. Americans under the age of 40 love to eat out, but these days most of them are experiencing financial stress, and this is having an enormous impact on the restaurant industry.
In 2023, visits to sit-down restaurants dropped by about five percent compared to 2022…
Americans are eating out less as inflation weakens the dollars in their pocket, which is leading to some harsh consequences for restaurants across the country.
Visits to sit-down restaurants were down nearly five percent in 2023 from the year prior, according to location analytics firm Placer.ai.
So this is a trend that has stretched on for over a year.
People just aren’t eating out as much as they once did.
As a result, we are seeing a wave of closures all over the country. Even in the Big Apple, large numbers of restaurants are being shut down…
Even big metropolitan areas in the US known for their great dining spots are struggling to maintain an environment where it’s profitable to run a restaurant.
Eater NY reported that over 40 bars and restaurants closed in New York City from December 2023 to January 2024, with some of the owners saying business simply never picked up after the COVID lockdowns in 2020.
When times get tough, difficult decisions need to be made.
After closing 46 restaurants last year, Applebee’s has decided to close another 35 locations this year…
Applebee’s is to close another 35 further locations this year, after shutting 46 in 2023.
The restaurant chain has shut at least three locations so far this year and has plans to close even more, president Tony Moralejo said in an earnings call on Wednesday.
Closing restaurants was ‘an incredibly difficult decision’ and a ‘last resort’ for the company, Moralejo said.
And I am very saddened by what has happened to Boston Market.
At one time they had almost 1,000 locations all over the United States, but now the entire chain is about to go belly up…
In the case of Boston Market, a chain that once had nearly 1,000 locations nationwide, the company’s death has been slow, but the pace of its demise has picked up over the past few months.
Now, with its store count continuing to dip, the chain seems to have reached the end even if it won’t confirm that given that there no longer appears to be anyone around to make that decision.
Boston Market owner Jignesh “Jay” Pandya was recently denied Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the second time and has been barred from filing again for six months. That leaves his company, which faces massive financial obligations, unable to gain court protection from its creditors.
Our ongoing inflation crisis is the primary reason why this is happening.
Consumers simply have a lot less discretionary income now.
Meanwhile, restaurants are facing much higher costs…
Jessica Dunker, the president and CEO of the Iowa Restaurant Association, said the reason restaurants are shuttering is because the cost of goods is up 30 percent and they are having to shell out higher wages to keep staff on.
Unfortunately, things aren’t going to get any better any time soon.
For example, the cost of orange juice is expected to go up dramatically because of a very bad harvest in Brazil…
Breakfast lovers are in for another jolt as orange juice prices surge to near-record levels. A new report released on Friday indicates that Brazil, the leading global exporter of OJ, is facing its worst harvest in over three decades. This alarming development compounds existing issues in Florida’s citrus groves, which have been plagued by disease and are experiencing collapsing production levels to the lowest in decades.
Fundecitrus wrote in a note that Brazil will produce 232.4 million boxes—each weighing about 90 pounds—for the growing season this year. That’s a 24% collapse from a year earlier and the lowest production levels in 36 years.
We have reached a point where the vast majority of Americans just can’t afford to eat out on a regular basis.
Needless to say, that is really bad news for fast food chains like McDonald’s.
At one time, serving middle class families was their core business.
But now most middle class families just can’t afford to eat at McDonald’s very often.
In a desperate attempt to lure them back, McDonald’s will soon introduce a five dollar meal deal…
McDonald’s is looking to launch a $5 meal in the US in a move to bring back price-sensitive customers.
The meal includes four items, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg and Restaurant Business. Customers would choose between two of the chain’s signature burgers — a McChicken or a McDouble — and get four-piece McNuggets, fries, and a drink. The $5 promotion would last for a month, Bloomberg reported.
So they are going to bring back affordable food for one month.
That’s just great.
Unless they make the five dollar meal deal permanent, I don’t expect that it will make much of a difference.
Consumers are really hurting right now. In fact, consumer sentiment just fell to the lowest level in six months…
Consumer sentiment plunged to the lowest level in six months as price increases reaccelerated, according to the latest University of Michigan survey of consumers, released Friday.
Additionally, consumers are bracing for even higher price increases in the year ahead compared to readings from prior months, the survey found.
The gauge, which is closely tracked by the Biden administration, plunged 13% from April’s 77.2% reading, to 67.4%. That’s the biggest one-month drop since mid-2021. Economists polled by FactSet were expecting consumer expectations to fall to just 76.9%.
As I have discussed previously, the American people are deeply pessimistic about the economy at this stage.
And they have good reason to be pessimistic, because even though our politicians in Washington are engaging in an unprecedented spending spree in a desperate attempt to keep the economy propped up, the truth is that the wheels are starting to come off and tremendous chaos is ahead.
Ed Dowd agrees that big trouble is coming during the months ahead. He just told Greg Hunter that he expects the U.S. economy “to take a nosedive sometime in the next 12 months”…
What happens to the Biden economy? Dowd says, “The economy is going to take a nosedive sometime in the next 12 months. The real economy is not doing well. . . . The only thing that has been holding up the GDP growth is government spending. We are spending $1 trillion every 100 days. That’s adding $1 trillion to the deficit. The only job creation is government jobs, and they don’t actually add to the economy. . . . Reports are coming out now that the low-income consumer is getting absolutely hammered. McDonald’s talked about it in their most recent earnings call. . . . So, low-income and the middle-class are getting squeezed while the rich continue to plug along.”
I agree.
Of course we don’t have to wait for the economy to come apart at the seams, because that is already happening.
At one time, the entire world marveled at the greatness of the mighty U.S. economy, but our leaders have completely wrecked it.
There is no way that we are going to be able to avoid disaster, and so I would encourage you to prepare for very hard times while you still can.
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Mysterious destruction at food plants isn’t helping.
This is only a partial list.
#NPMA2021 – 2022
“Basic Economics” by Thomas Sowell.
If they cared about “the poor” they wouldn’t what they always do.
This is about taking down America. The more desperate the stupid people become,
the more they turn to government for the solution that their government CAUSED.
Wakey Wakey America.
OOPS. Too late.
I always look forward to your art posts and commentary.
and the farms too. They really like burning chickens and cattle alive.
Since a lot of these restaurants refused to pay a living or decent wages and overtime over the decades, it seems like economic justice. Trading and bartering is the way to go, and is likely not too far off in the future as main source of getting goods and services.
Restaurants are the entry level for young people to enter the workforce.
The owner of the restaurant is the one who makes his living off his business, the employees should be students working for a higher position/ education, like learning to hold a job and be dependable, while making good grades in their STEM studies.
That argument is put forth often but it’s not realistic. This country made its decision prior to and in sending the manufacturing overseas, thereby creating low end jobs primarily for those in the lower income brackets who lacked skills and training due to the stratified education (economics), to have access to better paying jobs and those with stability and full benefits. A lot of angles apply to this such as the the failed responsibility of the Church in providing a framework to engage with and train individuals and groups within locales that were pushed out of job opportunities due to bad policies that endured hardship or systemic lack, in availing practical venues for expansion. Also the public at large letting government assistance go on without intervention to resolve the underlying problems made it a chronic situation for many.
It was the mid-70’s when the concept of our economy transitioning from a manufacturing base to a service oriented economy first evolved. Then, factories started to close, operations were “off shored” and higher paying jobs were destroyed. Why, for what one welder was paid we could hire 3 call center kids. The new economy really rocks, doesn’t it?
The old lie about sending manufacturing overseas I see. That didn’t happen to any great extent. What really happened is 1) automation killed around 60 million US manufacturing jobs, and 2) Americans began consuming far more, bought from China especially, financed by debt. There have been around 2-4 million manufacturing jobs lost to overseas production, which is hardly a blip compared to the 60:million plus lost to manufacturing. Get a clue already. This shit was self-inflicted.
Oh, that’s why the US cannot even try to keep up with Russian arms productions, for example! 🤣 🤦♂️
Thanks for clearing that up.
I’ve read your opposing stance on this matter a couple of times now and in my opinion your point is not entirely valid. To say:”Jobs were sent overseas” is a (too) simplified point, yes.
There are multiple processes, which led to the result that manufacturing jobs decreased over time. If (only) automation were the cause, the US would have cutting edge automated production of all kinds of products today , easely scalable to all numbers needed with moderate prices. And this, the U.S. has definitely not!
But the end-point doesn’t change: This shit was self-inflicted, right!
self-inflicted by big finance…reeee
Total Estimated Job Losses: 4.5 million to 14.1 million
Considering these estimates, it’s possible that between 4.5 million and 14.1 million American jobs may have been lost to offshoring since 1970. However, please note that these estimates are rough and based on various sources, so the actual number of jobs lost may be higher or lower.
Dors – the US is very efficient. Don’t be fooled by narrative. What we are losing is the battle to stay in front due to failure to invest in engineers. But right you are – it was self-inflicted. A lot of US cost is red tape, govt, and stupid union associated costs.
the US is very efficient.
That made me laugh out loud.
You ever call a major utility, like a cell phone provider or the electric company? They have been at this long enough to know how many people are going to call on any given day and what kind of issue they are likely to have in what proportion. They have both the financial resources and the experience to know how to set up a customer service system that works efficiently and yet every time you call they are experiencing unexpected call volume- every time- and when you are on hold, between an endless repetition of how important your business is to them, you are forced to listen to a canned music tape that sounds like a ten year old recorded it on a tape deck in 1970 and hasn’t stopped playing it since. Then, when you finally get through to a Chad or Lori, they sound like they just finished bathing in the Ganges and are about as helpful as a mildly retarded yellow lab.
Efficiency means nothing if not saving time, not treating it as if it were meaningless and infinite.
America is perhaps the most wasteful Empire in the history of wasteful Empires. Time, resources, money, human capital, intellect, you name it we waste it.
Last week I needed a windshield replaced. The time spent on the phone alone was almost two hours total, it required two trips to the location 45 miles away- the first time they had the wrong windshield because whoever entered the VIN number replaced a 2 with a capital Z- and this from the premier windshield replacement company in the state. The same thing happened the last time. And this is in a state that is still 94% White and speaks the same language.
The advances in automation have been offset by the collapse of human skills and responsibility. Add language, culture, customs and values in conflict at an increasing and seemingly never ending rate and you’ve got a a slightly fatter, uglier version of the movie Brazil.
The thing that almost everyone in America and by association the West has overlooked completely is that at the very foundation of every system- especially economics- is the human element. People use products, people sell products. You need people no matter how much you automate. I think that they actually believe that we can one day have a world where robots make shit and sell it to other robots and people will become background scenery, like a distant mountain range or a forest.
You’re starting to sound like Yuri Hariri.
Anyway, this is academic at best. This is the collapse, the end of a civilization, not the middle of some sort of economic or manufacturing revolution. It all falls down.
You confuse resources available with efficiency. A person may be enormously efficient, but if there is only one taking 10,000 calls an hr, then customer service will suck. The US is one of the most efficient nations on earth. I grant you the issues you raise. But you seem to have ridiculed my statement. It was quite accurate, and precise in its language. This stuff I know.
i won’t attest to the accuracy of this particular source, but it is representative of what I said.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_productivity
Oh, and those call waiting times would be intentional. Those are cost centers not profit centers. Those centers would be quite efficient albeit intentionally understaffed and under resourced.
Yeah, like I said I don’t think you know what that word means.
The ratio of the effective or useful output to the total input in any system.
We live in a closed system, therefore you may not cherry pick which parts you wish to see as efficient while completely ignoring all the parts that are not.
Hasan it is actual you who doesn’t know. This is my area of expertise. You disputing such with me is akin to me telling you that you know nothing about farming. I understand efficiency and productivity and the application of resources at a world class level. The term I used are precise and accurate. Yours not so much, as you don’t even understand that you waiting on line isn’t reflective of how efficient the employee is actually handling calls. They are intentionally under resourced. They don’t want to answer those calls quickly, or they would. It is easily done, as you say. Not doing something isn’t the same as not being able to do it.
The system to you were crying about were call centers. I guarantee they are extremely efficient – the resources allocated handle a lot of calls. That is a micro system. The US macro system is also efficient relative to the world overall, as can be seen by its standard of living. You really can’t be that dense.
We are talking about business and organizational efficiency: Business efficiency describes how effectively a company generates products and services related to the amount of time and money needed to produce them. The US does that at a very high level.
if you make a widget five times faster but sell half as many and lose 25% of your customers every time they try to purchase or service the product because you don’t care about them, in what way did that efficiency benefit the manufacturer?
Serious question that begs a serious reply.
Making products without a market is unprofitable. What you describe is illogical. You suggest by the question that the telcos, utilities, banks, etc., lose customers because of the scenario you describe. But in fact they do not. The customers grumble, some leave, others leave other telcos and come, etc. For instance, I suspect you still get electricity, have some form of a phone, and internet. Despite the horrendous service, you haven’t really left. Maybe you dropped one for another, and others went the other way.
They know you really can’t leave. They know their bad service really doesn’t hurt them. If it did,they would change. In Oz, Qantas, which was one of 5he great airlines,with a near monopoly, went to shite. The outcry finally started to hit them with lost customers, and Lo and behold they actually suddenly started to improve.
Which is why I said the bad service was intentional. They know they will not lose net customers, or not many and not very fast. Everyone needs electricity, phone, internet. So they all cut service costs knowing the customers as a whole have no where else to go. The only way to hurt them would be for people to turn off electricity and throw away their phones. Not going to happen.
They have decided they don’t have to provide good service in that area – everyone will be bad. But that doesn’t mean that they won’t be efficient re calls per hr answered by each poor bastard in the call Center. They will be screwed royally.
You suggest by the question that the telcos, utilities, banks, etc., lose customers because of the scenario you describe. But in fact they do not.
But that’s not true. Look at us. We’ve gone Galt and that removed more than two customers from the system, it removed two successful businesses and all that entailed.
This isn’t over, it’s only just beginning. We happen to be early adapters, but there’s a wave forming. And using monopolies as an example of why it doesn’t matter if your business runs efficiently doesn’t address the vast majority of businesses that aren’t. That was the whole gist of this thread. Restaurants aren’t monopolies and unless they are efficient in every aspect, they aren’t going to survive. Just tossing out a plate of slop and demanding payment plus gratuity isn’t enough to keep things afloat.
Either way I always enjoy the back and forth from you and am very glad you escaped to a place that suits you. Kudos.
Good grief man, get over yourself! Stop navel gazing about your expertise on “efficiency” when the issue is really about the Quality of Service for customers. Across the board, customers take it in the shorts as every element of “cost” in the product, process, or business has been chiseled away at to save every penny that can be saved. Quality is crap these day. Service sucks. And prices continue going up despite the the cost reductions in every arena. The lying, deceitfulness about product packaging, smaller portions, higher prices, rather than just give us the same we are used to but raise the price. All the fakery and BS. There is nothing efficient about any of this except that Wall Street wants those quarterly numbers and don’t seem to care what the trends portend. Oh, I learned the market factors in all these things and is so prescient but since the age of computers and on-line instantaneous transactions for the well-heeled, the gambling game called Stocks & Commodities has simply been further rigged with complicit actions by Central Banks, and Governments. Oh, so efficient. Everything. Going down the tubes. But you can feel good … you are THE expert in “efficiency.”
I’m not dense and you know it. You know why I have never debated you about manufacturing? Because I know next to nothing about it and you know more than anyone I’ve ever met.
We aren’t talking about manufacturing in isolation to everything else. One produces a product in order to sell the product, not stockpile it for no reason.
You are a specialist, therefore I have the advantage over you as a generalist. You may be able to manufacture a product at ten times the rate that you once did, but if you sell it at half the rate you did before, what was the point?
The system is wholistic, not in isolation to its components.
And I am old enough and have lived in this country my entire life and measure the standard of living on a wide scale; familial relations, health, freedom, economic opportunity, social stability, morals, customs, leadership, well being. I see consumer goods in the same way I do entertainment, fairly low on my list of priorities.
The standard of living is most certainly far lower than it was in the year of my birth and declining rapidly. If you measure it by access to cheap goods alone you might make that claim, but in all other ways it is a disaster.
HSF – standard of living is in eye of the beholder. I take your position as truth. And generally agree, albeit my standard of living is vastly improved and by a lot.
Of course you are not dense. My comments relate to how much input per a given output, nothing more. On that basis, the US is incredibly efficient in what it does. The issue you raise seems to be what we are focusing the resources on. And I agree if I read that right. The US has become consumers instead of builders and savers and creators and preservers. It is a major issue. But we have become very efficient at consuming.
My point is also that by becoming such consumers we are sowing the seeds of our own destruction as we are losing our edge to China etc, as we consume more than we produce and borrow to do it while ignoring infrastructure, education, family, culture.
I suspect we aren’t too far off being on the same page.
You and I are most certainly on the same page and I suspect that since you began your Australian adventure even more so.
We were arguing apples and oranges and you are correct about aspects of the system becoming more efficient, I was pointing out that there is more to a system than just the manufacture, but on everything that comes after.
I always come back to that scene from I Love Lucy where she and Ethel take a job at the chocolate factory. It was alarmingly prescient in that it showed that no matter how well oiled the machine, it still rests on the backs of humans.
For example we have had solar power since 2008. Easy to purchase and install, impossible to service. A system that sells once but cannot be maintained afterwards is a system no one will ever purchase again. Efficiency for the sake of production is like having only one leg when you’re planning on running a marathon.
Please name a system in the US that is not efficient. Even the US govt is efficient by world standards. Manufacturing is, farming is, utilities are, etc etc etc. The US is becoming less competitive and is losing ground to competition. But it is still a world leader in every area I can think of. Again, you confuse service and quality with efficiency. I think you may not even know what a system is in respect to efficiency.
I had to make 3 45 minute trips for a windshield. The 4th time they managed to not break the glass before I got there.
LLOPH is a mammon worshipper, whether he knows or not.
You’re understating it a bit.
The US is extremely efficient – they earn money hand over fist without producing a single thing!
Only when hard reality interferes, they look almost as stupid as you.
Yes, the US is extremely efficient in every industry by world standards. Only a total imbecile wouldn’t understand that.
Lipoh,with all due respect, but that is BS! You have certainly your excellence level in your field of expertise but you are fixed to your numbers. You’ve said, you’re a math savant and as I see it, you are unable to think in processes. If there is a number, you think that explains everything.
But no, there are complex processes intertwined which botch any solitary “efficiency”. The output in general is spiraling down re quality of the products and customer oriented behaviour and benefits for the society.
I am with the farmer, in this case. Here in Germany, the productivity has declined since 2000, at first slow and now with accelerating pace. We live from our substance but now we are getting to the bones- very efficiently!
Full of shit as usual, Loopy.
Here is a rough estimate of the offshoring trend in the US manufacturing sector:
YearOffshoring Trend19855% of US manufacturing jobs offshored199010% of US manufacturing jobs offshored200020% of US manufacturing jobs offshored201030% of US manufacturing jobs offshored202040% of US manufacturing jobs offshored
“As globalization transforms the world economy, in fact, many U.S.-based companies are shifting the balance of their workforces overseas. Ford, for example, reported in 1992 that 53 percent of its employees worked in the U.S. and Canada. By 2009, its North American workforce (by then Ford had expanded to Mexico) made up only 37 percent of total payroll. With 53 percent of big U.S. firms implementing offshoring strategies, “there is no job security now,” said Lauren Asplen of the IUE-CWA, an electrical-workers union.
The trend began in earnest in the late 1970s at large manufacturers such as General Electric. GE’s then CEO, Jack Welch, who was widely respected by other corporate chieftains, argued that public corporations owe their primary allegiance to stockholders, not employees. Therefore, Welch said, companies should seek to lower costs and maximize profits by moving operations wherever is cheapest. “Ideally,” Welch said, “you’d have every plant you own on a barge to move with currencies and changes in the economy.” Not only did GE offshore much of its manufacturing, so did its parts suppliers, which were instructed at GE-orchestrated “supplier migration seminars” to “migrate or be out of business.”
Between 2000 and 2010, nearly six million jobs in US manufacturing were lost, with the sectors most prone to globalisation displacement, such as textiles and furniture, taking the biggest hit, according to research by Bonvillian and MIT’s Peter L Singer.
Other metrics tell the same story. The fixed capital investment of manufacturing (plant, equipment, information technology, and so on) actually declined in the 2000s – for the first time since data collection began in 1947.
Meanwhile, US manufacturing output grew only 0.5% per year between 2000 and 2007, and during the global financial crisis of 2007–09 fell by a huge 10.3%. Only in very recent years has manufacturing output returned to pre-recession levels. Similarly, US productivity growth in manufacturing also hit a nadir that decade, and remains at historically low levels.
These negative trends are confirmed by trade figures. In 2015, the US ran a trade deficit of $832bn in manufactured goods, while in 2017 the total included a $110bn deficit in advanced technology products – a figure that has grown since 2002. This is a shocking state of affairs, considering how many advanced technologies originate in the US.
“Financial markets put enormous pressure on large companies to get rid of their [US] workers and plants and move away from being vertically integrated companies in which everything took place within the company itself.” says Berger.
Flash, you ignorant slut – nowhere in there is there a number on how many jobs from manufacturing have been outsourced.
But let’s do some math. $832 billion deficit in manufactured goods from that shitpile you posted. Labor and labor overheads can be estimated at say 20% of that, no more, and I am being generous. So say for ease of calculation that is $200 billion. At a total labor and overhead cost of $100,000 each, 200,000,000,000 divided by 100,000 = 2 million jobs. Now, there is some slop in that estimate. Maybe it is actually 4 million. But maybe it is under 2 million. But also, my point that the US is consuming more hasn’t been allowed for. So take the excess consumption off that $832 billion, and that two million estimate craters significantly. For fuck sake, iPhones are what 200 billion a year all by themselves. You are a dolt.
But here is the deal – manufacturing used to employ half the workforce. There are something like 160 million workers. Half of that would be 80 million. But wait! Only 10 million work in manufacturing. Maybe 2 million went overseas, but maybe a lot less. So where did the other 70 million fucking jobs go, you imbecile? They were automated away, that is where. 70 million jobs were automated away. Maybe a couple million jobs went overseas. It isn’t even worth talking about. It is spit in the ocean.
YOUR OWN FUCKING NUMBERS PROVE I AM RIGHT. Seriously, get a clue. I have forgotten more about this shit than you will ever know. I am a damn math savant. You can maybe count to twenty one if you unzip.
Been to Detroit lately?
Oh yeah and fuck you
Wow, another nitwit who doesn’t know that Detroit went down to robots. And unions of course. But mostly robots.
Standard of living in the eye of the beholder per Llpoh
Turn closed caption on for a hoot.
This is the kind of materialism that ultimately destroyed America. Well done, flash.
The business you speak of is now a multi generational South American enterprise living in shared housing and driving in uninsured vehicles 3/4 quarters of the year after they’ve meet the registration renewal obligation. What other government subsidies god only knows.
Do you really think the bulk of people in this country have the ability or funds to pursue STEM degrees? Restaurants pay high level wages to people who either cannot afford or don’t have the aptitude for that. Waiters in high end NYC restaurants make over $100,000K. We need to stop shaming people who do real work for a living.
Your economic ignorance is staggering.
BTW, how does it help the unskilled poor, if jobs they’re qualified for dry up? Maybe they could all move in with you, SJWtard.
I said about 25 years ago that when McDonald’s restaurants start closing in mass, you will know that the end of the United States is at hand. And now it appears that The Great Fast Food Purge is at hand. It will be very satisfying to watch them all go belly-up.
Is McDonalds closing any locations?
We did notice something strange about 8 years ago when the local Wally World’s Mickey Dees closed down. OTOH, it sure seems odd that Starbucks seems to be in about every grocery store in town. Kinda interesting that women and girls are the most common customers.
Kalifornika
This is typical when a county’s currency begins to hyper-inflate. Restaurants here are not busy, there are few people out and about, no doubt they are staying close to home eating frozen pizza and streaming a free movie.
When the cheap grocery store food is too expensive, then is the time to be concerned. Chili, spaghetti, cabbage stew and good old rice and beans will keep a family alive. Much better for you than McD garbage. This will get much worse until they transition to a reset currency.
Rice and beans and beans and rice.
Ask the Mexicans how long you can live on rice and beans. 🙂
They’d be fine if they didn’t have the highest per capita consumption of soda in the world.
Mexican Cokes have so much sugar content you can become diabetic just looking at a bottle of that stuff. But true, their diet is OK.
diet stuff is worse than sugar, for developing diabetes. it elicits a nuke-out strength insulin response without there even being any sugar present.. then blood sugar drops to dangerously low levels, the person feels terribly hungry, eats more diet crap , repeat, and puts a person’s system on chronic insulin overload and sugar imbalance. better to just eat the sugar.. or better yet to avoid the crap all together.
seriously who thought it was somehow natural or wholesome to have a whole industry producing weird bottled concoctions and that being what people drink?
even something simple like tea is a bazillion times more wholesome and natural (and in any case the tradition of boiling the water before drinking it has a lot going for it and if it got mixed with with putting various leaves into the water as it boils thats pretty benign) and has a good place in traditional diets.
what happened to their corn?
I’ve been reading about the tit-for-tat back and forth with the eevul US.gov over GM corn and Monsanto seeds. Earlier in the year the Mexican government was still giving DC the finger as they don’t want the crap corn we get. It could have changed, IDK. Trade agreements require poisoning the citizens and it looks like Mexico actually cares about the beaners which is their duty.
Rice and beans and canned fish will provide all you need to live…those three alone are the least expensive food prep…that give you what you need.
Stockpile ONLY 3 FOODS to SURVIVE – Why this is ALL you NEED
Thanks as always, mark.
I did this many years ago
was sick as shit
let’s stick with telling people to grow real food
Eggs and vitamin c.
wheat is more nutritious and cheaper and longer-storing than rice, plus you are more likely to be able to grow it out
not a fan of wheat, but rice and beans sucks too.
The ability or know-how to cook particularly basic things will make the difference between a hardship and an extreme situation in the hard financial times coming. A lot of people in poverty, and others such as many single people, spend what little money they have on food at restaurants largely because they haven’t been taught to cook. They are likely already at a nutritional disadvantage. Probably many of them can barely manage to prepare two of the four dishes you mentioned.
Z- Most people have a crock pot in their home, everything I listed can be made in a crock pot by a 10 y/o as it is simple. We have several rice cookers and there are many different types of rice cooking here every week. You do know crock pots were originally marketed just as bean cookers, right?
BL, Nailed it in your first sentence. When the money has end-stage cancer nearly all businesses will fail–whole industries one after another like dominoes. This happens as consumers decide to remove products and services one by one from their once exuberant and wasteful budgets. We will all be surprised what we can do without when we must. The restaurants plight is just the tip of the shitberg.
How refreshing and liberating to learn contentment. No sarc! How graceful to learn it voluntarily. Muricans regard contentment as worse than a death sentence.
Once you leave the touristy areas in the SC Lowcountry, it’s bad, despite the huge influx of retirees & 20-somethings.
The only Booger King in Beaufort closed down 6 months ago. High traffic count on US 21 at SC 170, right next to a 2-story Mickey D’s and a Chick-Fil-A across the street.
The privatiely owned middle priced & higher end downtown restaurants are busy as h*ll. The owner of 3 told me that his problem was hiring 18-25ish old employees that will show up for work.
Our local SC region has new restaurants opening regularly Aiken Co and Edgefield Co are in a BOOM mode with growth from Augusta and Fort Gordon (I refuse to call it Eisenhower).
In business school in the early-’70s, we learned about ‘leading’ and ‘trailing’ in dictators … and 2 of the big ones were/are truck traffic and rail traffic. Those 2 are ‘leading’ indicators … and, over many years, they’ve seemed to be a good barometer of things to come.
Right now — for some inexplicable reason — truck traffic seems to be very evident on the roads … how long that will last is anybody’s guess … but the pendulum will eventually swing … and those 65+ million illegal aliens in the US today will suddenly not look like such a great idea … nor will the EBT/welfare/HUD expenditures …
Before something can be shipped there must be packaging to put it in. Take a look at production trends in the corrugated box market. Sexy as hell, isn’t it?
Boxed in China or other far east countries.
you can identify Chinese corrugated easily.
A few years back the local diner charged $7 for breakfast with coffee. It is now $12 and change. The $7.50 lunch special is now $13 and change. At the seafood dive a shrimp basket was $9 and I could take the wife out for lunch for $23. We did that same meal today where it was $36. I can make all of these meals for a quarter to a third of the current cost at the house. Restaurants overhead has gone through the roof and they can’t help but to increase pricing just to stay in business. Inflation is not at 5% like the government reports. It is closer to 17% to 20% a year for the past 3 years.
The multi-national fast food restaurants have been throwing in a extra measure of GREED-flation in addition, IMO.
One of Joe Biden’s “singular accomplishments”.
Chains are doomed. People are not going to pay top dollar for microwaved food. The mom and pop places that have strong followings and are able to adapt will survive. Also any restaurant serving latin food will do well. It’s the new demographic.Open a taco joint in a blue state and it’s guaranteed success.
It’s garbage food
t’s garbage food, but huge low job skills employment.
Try tree rat, whistle pig and possum. See what ya think then.
No economic collapse until stock market collapses under the weight of illegal Central Bank QE purchases to keep it afloat, and Corp America on the Fascist plantation. The biggest transfer of wealth in world history. And you are apart of the lie if you own US Stocks. Until the inevitable collapse, and coming soon.
The cracks are showing here in my Midwest locale. Already a lot of fast food outlets have closed (these are ones that survived through COVID, then closed in the last year). These include multiple Hardee’s, Arby’s, and Jack in the Box, most notably. A not insignificant number of local mom and pops, and A few multi location locally owned places have bowed out.
O’Charleys bailed completely from the market, after once having 5 or 6 locations here in the wider metro area. A couple of Red Lobster locations closed even before the recent corporate bankruptcy. A once well retarded trendy local pizza outfit with (at one point) several locations has dwindled to one.
I expect the latter half of 2024 to really begin revealing how bad it truly is for restaurants. I’ve recently noted numerous places have breached the $4 mark for a soft drink (soda or iced tea). Some sides have gotten very expensive, and had reduced portion sizes on top of that.
I still do some eating out, very selectively and much less than I once did pre-covid. Not only has the cost gotten too high, the food quality has declined as has the service in most cases. I simply can’t justify the cost to value now for a lot of places I used to enjoy. I’ve also been trying to improve my diet, and eating out makes that nearly impossible.
Last purchased meal was 2 years ago with one of the kids-$34 for a burger meal with onion rings and large malt at one of the upper middle of the road regional burger chains. Service sucked. Never again.
Too much consumption in the west. Restaurants aren’t real economy. Just a service economy and part of the rampant consumption that exists in the US. And the west in general. We are consuming far too much, and saving and investing far too little. Any interruption in the consumption model is trumpeted as a catastrophe. There was a time when saving and investing was deemed the road to prosperity. Now it is all about consumption.
My wife and I went out to eat close enough to never to call it never for at least ten years when our kids were young. No delivery food either. We saved and invested instead of consumed. It worked for us. It will work large scale as well. But it will now be painful as hell for a while as the entire economy is addicted to consumption and debt instead of saving and investment.
What a shit show.
i dunno, the whole restaurant and eating out thing seems like a very recent phenomenon and more a side effect of the fake wealth bubble of the 90s and after. growing up we just about never ate out, and the very concept of eating out was something like a special event or something rich people did.. and eating out was something like perkins or eat’n park (anybody know the pittsburgh area?) that the grandparents would take us to for a once a year treat or something. we’d even have to dress nicely!!
even ordering a pizza was a special occasion and only a couple times in a year.
and yet especially after 2000 or so it seemed like everybody was constantly eating out, and it made no sense. not only was it like 5x more expensive, but the food was always crap, the resuatrant was just a conduit for some manufactured industrial foodservice garbage. i recall in the end of the 90s or early 2000s one way or another most of our crowd had started making pretty good money, and about half of the crowd began gathering at various restaurants on a weekly or even several times a week basis. i dropped out of most of those. it really only seems to be a recent phenomenon that people eat out so much.. i still don’t get it.
to some extent middle of the workday street food type of stuff i can see.. though thats also gone off the deep end, from being cheap and simple, to being a whole boutique scene as well.. and i’d often even cook and bring my own lunch even when working at tech companies with the ‘in house kitchens’ fad going strong in the 05-15 years.
so seeing that overinflated scene deflate seems like a natural correction. if that much of the economy has come to rest on eating out, then it’s hollow and fake and deserves to come back down to earth.
There goes all those low paying part-time jobs Biden created. But don’ worry, Joe will hire most of them as government employees to keep the unemployment numbers low.
When I was young young on long Island we had many many jobs . There were manufactures of all kinds Dorne and Margolin ,Suffolk county frame ,symbol technologies, majestic plastics literally hundreds of companies machine shop medical and aerospace . Most of that stuff is gone. There are a few defense related manufacturers left ,but it’s a shell of what was there
Yeah but then we became a ‘service economy’, then we were told ‘learn to code‘, then we became a ‘gig economy’ and now were are just a ‘total economic disaster‘.
Food trucks have really sprung up here and they can have excellent food. Reasons are obvious.
we still have a big lack of young workers though. Have you noticed how few young people there seems to be out and about? Teens through mid twenties.
I can’t believe this STEM push is popular here. Training to be an inhuman technocrat.
Sad is seeing the elderly who have to work