cw fresh liberal ~~theory~~ braindump:
spoiler
Are those pre-pandemic era prices you are referring to? Yes, things have changed. The pandemic highlighted how restaurants had a fundamentally flawed business model by operating so tightly with such small margins. A healthy business needs to be able to weather bumps in the road like the pandemic, but if you are doing the equivalent of living paycheck to paycheck as a business, that means your prices are too low. The pandemic really highlighted how as restaurant patrons, we were underpaying this entire time. A meaningful portion of the price increase you've seen at restaurants across the board since then has simply been correcting prices to what they should have been this whole time.
It does suck, because we were all used to getting an underpriced meal and and it sucks giving up something we are all so used to but the solution isn't to keep a flawed restaurant business culture where most fail in the first 5 years and most can't handle being shut down for a couple of weeks.the solution is to treat dining out as more of a luxury than we were previously and adapt by cooking more and what have you.
profits are a divine construct
