Skip to main content

Rising Cost

On our recent trip, going out to eat proved to be an illuminating lesson on how the world has change since the pandemic and events following it. The waitstaff is paid a decent wage for a high school student trying to make money for college tuition.  There is a path for them to earn $10,000 over summer which should cover the bulk of costs for an in-state public university. That part is great - we are helping kids get out of college debt free and enter their independent lives with a lot of choices. 

While that is good for a person in that life stage who has their room and board covered by parents, it is not enough someone older and its no surprise that the staff is uniformly young - not so different from pre-pandemic days. But what is remarkably different is the portion sizes of items on the menu relative to the price. They are very small - to the point an entrée looks closer to an appetizer and is priced double of what it used to be pre-pandemic. The combination makes for a very over-priced and unsatisfactory experience for the customer. 

In many cases the menu's are dynamically priced and you scan a QR code to see what the numbers are today. The checkout is digital and via tablet so there is efficiency in that - but with the downside of the waitress holding up the tablet to your face as you decide the tip amount. In contrast cooking a nice meal with grocery store ingredients is more expensive than it used to be but not nearly close to what a lunch a decent establishment would cost. 

Every place we visited was busy and running at full capacity - if rising inflation is hurting people's ability to spend, that is certainly not evident from seeing the flow of traffic to these establishments. Maybe its still the euphoria of being free to go out, mingle and not be masked at all times. People are not done celebrating that yet. I had to wonder what happens when that fades out because there will come a time when the music will slow down and the party thin out. 

Even more surprising was our attempts to pick up some produce at the farmer's markets that dot the state route we took to return home. We have been this way many time and stopping for fruit, vegetables, honey and preserves is something we look forward to. The prices are a bit higher but the quality more than makes up for it. 

This time around 90% of the stands were shuttered and the few that were open had no customers on a weekend with high traffic conditions. We made several attempts to find a place that was half way reasonably priced and it simply did not work. The assortment was not what it used to be and everything was priced four or five times higher than before. No surprise that they were not selling much. We observed shoppers leave with one item maybe two.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more