When I look around at my choices of places to eat, it's becoming quite clear that the number of fast food places are drastically increasing. More and more are being built, and more and more real restaurants and mom and pop type places are disappearing. It's no wonder there are so many people in the US are obese. I think it's incrediby frustrating, and I wonder if this trend is occurring in other parts of the world.

Your thoughts?

Unfortunately it comes down to the $, plain and simple.

Independents can�t compete with the marketing/exposure that the chains have. Customers are willing to settle for decent/passable if it is convenient and cheap which is what the chains provide.

Independents generally can�t fork over the $ for space in the new strip mall going up. I was just thinking about this today as drive by a new strip mall going up in Schaumburg and in it will be a Chipoltle and some other fast food place. If one goes a few blocks over one can choose real Mex food from 4 to 5 taquerias.

Customers today equate volume w/quality, again something the chains provide. I couldn�t tell you the amount of times I�ve heard, �Restaurant X is great, the portions are huge!� which speaks nothing to the quality.

Customers want atmosphere over quality of the food. Most would rather go to a PF Chang�s rather than the local Asian independent offering.

My biggest belief, customers are lazy & gun shy. The chain is known for what it provides; most people I know do not venture beyond a chain for fear of the unkown. They would rather put up w/run of the mill than get burned with a possible bad meal at the independent.

There are some decent items on some chain restaurant menus, but there is far better (and generally much cheaper) at the independent.

Good food comes from places where the staff/chef have a stake in the success of the restaurant. Your average cook/waitstaff at TGIF's for example, works for a corporation that will survive even if the food is vile at his/her particular location. He/she has no incentive to make the food as good as it could be, or even good at all. Even if the staff wants to improve the food, the corporate bean counters usually give the staff little controll. At a mom & pop restaurant, the happiness of the customers is directly tied to the financial success of mom & pop. Even at the risk of an occasional unsatisfactory meal, I'd rather support mom & pop than most any corporate chain.
Chains are for ghosts to rattle.

One of the biggest changes in the last 25 years is that the access to unsecured capital is pretty much dead. When my father started his diner in downtown Chicago in 1962, unsecured capital was king. Vendors of necessities like bread and milk would often extend one and even two years of store credit. Even in the 70s and early 80s when I first started getting involved in the business, getting a $2500 loan from a vendor and paying it back over a year at $10/day was commonplace. If any loans were secured, they were secured by your inventory and equipment, and maybe by the ability to take over and sublet your lease.

Today, forget it. Is an independent willing to put down his/her house, car, savings, etc. as collateral? Except for some ethnic groups, usually not. So, we get the full national chain conglomerates such as Brinker (Chili's, Romano Macaroni Grill) and Darden (Red Lobster and Olive Garden), or the regional multi-concept chains such as Lettuce Entertain You here in Chicago.

In some of these situations, new restaurants get funded by rounding up forty guys that want to invest $30k each to say they own a restaurant. The management firm makes it money by getting exclusive contracts for supervising construction, providing HR and quality control services, marketing, accounting, operations, etc. If that restaurant fails, the management firm might still have even made a profit.

I don't mind local chains like lettuce entertain you in Chicago or McCormick & schmick's in Portland OR. It's when they get too big for one owner to keep track of that they get out of hand. A perfect example is UNO's pizzeria. Once a defining bulwark of 'Chicago cuisine', they have gone so corporate that the product has become irrelevant. It might as well be Pizza Hut.

Exactly. Not to mention the supply problem. Mom & pop can buy their foodstuffs from local merchants and farmers who take pride in their products. The corporates buy from other corporates, so they serve Kraft and Oscar Mayer instead of buying locally. They don't have a choice because they are too big. one local farmer can't grow enough to supply every Bennigans. So the corporates go to the corporate machine farms where the ethic is that one bad apple DOESN'T spoil the whole bunch, it just ends up in your hot apple McPie.

[This message has been edited by HigherFlyer (edited 10-30-2003).]

I live in the Wash DC area has to do with a number of things.
1. I think the increase in the number of fast foods is due to the family with two employed. I don't know what you call them. like Yupees or bupees or something. No time, buy fast food.

2. My employees are pretty close to minimun wage, yet they do not bring lunch(I do) they buy fast food every day for lunch. They buy fast food for dinner every day. I provide food for monthly company meetings. I once bought strange sandwiches (designer chicken & cheeses) on funny Italian bread things (foccacia). They allowed it was decent, but would prefer burgers or pizza.

3. I do not think the number of better class restaurants in the DC area has decreased. In fact, since 1963, the area has had a tremendous growth of better restaurants. The DC people do not rave about them like other areas, so they sort of go unnoticed.

There has been tremendous growth since 1990.

I do not think there has been much growth of better restaurants since Bush was elected and the economy soured.

The growth of fast foods since 2000 has also slowed.

Also note that fast food was mcdonald and other burgers and pizza and chicken. Now we have these franchise steak things and noodle things and seafood things that are between fine dining and FF.

FF is able to produce many $ per square foot and per employee $, and compared to the price of food raw materials, no one can compete.



[This message has been edited by slawecki (edited 10-31-2003).]

Check this current NY Times article out: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/31/in...pe/31OBES.html .

IMHO three or more oriental (or Mex, or Ital etc) restaurants open in Philly or Honolulu for each fast food restaurant. Of course many close but few ff close as they have a business plan. I eat at a very few ff restaurants, but I have not gotten to more than 2% of the local non-ff restaurants. I honestly dont think there is much to worry about EXCEPT the world is becoming OBESE.

MisterNice

From the article:

"Doughnuts 'are a normal part of a healthy, balanced diet,' said Brooke Smith, a spokeswoman for Krispy Kreme."

"It's OK, I had Subway for lunch."

If I could eat exactly one donut per month, then they would be part of my diet. But since I won't stop at one but will instead eat three, and then go off on a sugar-induced binge of greasy food eating, they are not.

I wonder if one reason why the fast food restaurants seem to be proliferating is that rents have gone sky-high in some areas, driving out local merchants. In the area in which I live, San Vicente Boulevard used to have many little neighborhood shops; e.g. camera shop, pet supplies, rare book dealer, etc.). As the leases expire, the landlords have jacked up the rent so high that these little independent businesses have closed their doors only to be replaced by fast food chains. Thus, in less than a mile one sees (at least) 4 pizza chains, a Subway, a Quiznos, Peets, Starbucks, Coffee Bean, a new fast-food burger place and a couple of ice cream places. There is only 1 true neighborhood coffee shop left, Early World, which has been in business for over 30 years. One wonders how much longer they will survive.
Edited to add: Baja Fresh and La Salsa

[This message has been edited by obscure2k (edited 10-31-2003).]

I enjoy gourmet cuisine as often as the bathroom scale will allow me to, but I have no problem with the proliferation of restaurant chains which often replace so-called "mom and pop" places. They seem to provide a reliable, convenient, consistent, and typically affordable product to the general public, which appears to prefer going to such places rather than the higher-priced mom and pop. While the inefficient "mom and pop" places may be disappearing, there is fierce competition between the chains for customers, so they are constantly tryng to improve their products and service per customer dollar spent.
When I'm on the road somewhere in the boonies and I want a quick meal and break, I'd rather head into one of the known brands than risk stopping at the unknown taqueria and landing up with slow service, food poisoning, no air conditioning, filthy toilet, etc. The local "color" in such places simply doesn't make up for the "dining" experience I have there.

As for obesity, well, that's another complicated story I have a professional interest in. Our society has gotten so affluent and the overall price of food has come down so much that even poor people can now afford to overeat and become obese, especially when coupled with less overall physical activity (more TV, more FT surfing instead of wood chopping, etc.). Though fast food restaurants provide an inexpensive product with a lot of calories/$ spent, it is ultimately the individual who decides to keep overeating even though he is obese. Eating a hamburger from McDonald's isn't going to make you any more obese than eating a hamburger from a local mom and pop restaurant or a hamburger your mama makes you at home. The problem is when you continue to eat more hamburgers than your body can burn off, and the challenge is to figure out how to get people to stop stuffing themselves, now that almost everyone in the U.S. can afford to do so.

"The Latest Good-for-You Food: Fried Chicken?

"Longing for health food? Reach for some fried chicken. That's the unlikely message, anyway, of KFC's latest marketing push. Produced by Chicago-based Foote Cone & Belding, the new campaign celebrates the nutritional benefits of eating fried chicken (I'm not making this up). In one of the new spots, which debut this week on network and cable television, a man is sitting on the back of his pickup truck wolfing down a piece of fried chicken. A friend rides up on a bike and says, 'Man, you look fantastic -- what have you been doing?' His answer: 'Eatin' chicken.' The spot goes on to explain that a KFC chicken breast has 11 grams of carbohydrates and 40 grams of protein..."

http://www.business2.com/articles/we...0.html?cnn=yes

(if this doesn't come up, access it through CNN's website)

Interesting. While the article's author seems unconvinced/unaware of the health benefits of controlling carbs, I wasn't aware that KFC's fried chicken was so low in carbs. I always check for that info whenever I go to fast-food places. I guess I've got a new place to check out this week...

I have to agree with the original poster about fast food jst dominating. Here in the Hudosn Valley, only in the past 8 to 10 years have fast food places, started to appear. Beofre that they just didn't exist. The choices for eats here are incredibile. No reason to frequent a fast food joint for any reason. In this case FF means Applebees, Olive Garden, (Which is horrible!!!) Ruby Tuesday and places like that. When I was growing up Mickey D's, BK and Wendys were always around and I frequnted them quite often. Now its almost all mom and pop that use organic meats and veggies and try to avoid mass produced if possible. While at work in NYC I am constantly looking for something fresh and innovative for lunch, still looking. I see people in my office eating Mickey D's everyday since to Monopoly promotion came out. It makes me sick. I try to grab a salad and just be happy with that. Ocasionally some Pizza. Sweet Willie, Any good mom and pop places in Oakbrook, Lombard area? My gf lives around that area and I am dying for something new besides chain places. Enough of that rant.

Having lived and worked in Chicago, I must say that it's a REALLY bad situation in the Loop, at least compared to Manhattan. Nothing mom-and-pop in the Loop anymore, except maybe the Dill Pickle (is that even still there anymore?) or Monk's Pub, which re-modeled itself into a frigging SPORTS BAR!

Manhattan has good choices - not enough, but certainly, they are there if you take time to look for them. Arcolai, what do you eat/search for at lunch?

While I was growing up, there was a Domino�s Pizza on Avenue L in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn. This was one of many pizza places on Avenue L. Like the other local mom-and-pop pizzerias, they had very good pizza.

Eventually, I started hearing about this �other� Domino�s Pizza � the one with the red, white and blue Domino logo � when I started traveling. I initially wondered if the two pizza companies were related.

The fact that the original Domino�s Pizza on Avenue L � along with many other mom-and-pop pizzerias in Brooklyn � closed their doors a long time ago while the big pizza chains infiltrated Brooklyn certainly � and sadly � answered my question.