America Has A Terrifying Fast-Casual Food Problem No One Is Talking About
Brought to you by chicken that cut the roof of my mouth.
FelixRenaud, Karolina Grabowska | Canva Editor's Note: This is a part of YourTango's Opinion section where individual authors can provide varying perspectives for wide-ranging political, social, and personal commentary on issues.
A few weeks ago, we made the mistake of going to a fast-casual restaurant known for its “wild wings” and sports gear. Now, I’ll be the first to say that I was a massive, massive fan of Buffalo Wild Wings back in the day. I was stoked. I was ready to buy my favorite sauce: Caribbean jerk. Yum.
We sat down, ordered our food, and then it arrived. It looked starkly different from how I remembered my last visit. The boneless wings were small, sad little lumps with sauce poured over them.
Even the sauce looked wrong. Caribbean Jerk usually had a rich, red-brown color to it. This sauce was abysmally orange and kinda smelled like cat food. My husband’s wings were not much better.
I tried them. They tasted like cat food — specifically, the wet cat food I taste-tested for my cats that I rejected. (I won’t let my cats eat anything I don’t approve of.) I tried to power through it. My husband ate two of his and then stopped.
We chose to pay and leave the restaurant. I felt sick the rest of the night. The wings were so tough, that my mouth bled from biting into one. My husband and I sat in the car after throwing out the wings, feeling embarrassed for the staff there and for us.
Sadly, this is not the first time this has happened to us at a fast-casual restaurant in recent years. We also experienced this at Chipotle, Qdoba, and others like it. We quietly agreed that fast-casual was no longer on our menu. Most people are aware that fast food venues like McDonald’s have been overcharging and underwhelming.
What we didn’t expect was for this trend to hit the fast-casual chain restaurant circuit, too. After all, the majority of the appeal of fast-casual sit-down chains like Buffalo Wild Wings and Applebee’s was that they weren’t McDonald’s.
They were supposed to be better — a little higher quality, a little more upscale, a little more capable than fast food. They were still supposed to have speedy service and a casual setting, but they weren’t places to wait in line for a teen to send your food over a counter. And yet, here we are, seeing the same business mistakes of Mackey-D’s hitting places like B-Dubs.
Fast-casual restaurant chains, in general, are facing an apocalypse.
It’s no secret that chain restaurants are struggling these days. Think about the last time you went to an Olive Garden, a P.F. Chang’s, a Ruby Tuesday’s, or even Chipotle. If you’re like me, it’s been a hot minute. But, why? There are many reasons.
Cutting Corners
During the 1980s and early 1990s, restaurant chains were full-fledged restaurants that did everything in their kitchens. While stores like Red Lobster had their proprietary mixes, the meals were still prepped in-house with legit cookware.
That started to slow down in the mid-90s, only to go into full swing by the 2010s. Most people don’t go to Applebee’s because they were outed as being avid fans of “Chef Mike,” also known as Mike Roe Wave (microwave). Others started to cut corners too.
Eventually, a lot of the foods you see on menus were simply unpackaged and heated freezer “easy meals” just like the ones you see on store aisles. Why pay $50 for a meal for two when you can get the same microwaved stuff at home for $6?
Overpricing
This is the same issue McDonald’s has today. Fast casual was a bargain meal when it first started. It used to be that you could get a good meal for two at a typical fast-casual chain for $20 to $45.
Today, the price of a night out at Red Lobster is around $70 for two people in my area. Our Buffalo Wild Wings scores up to $50 without alcohol. Even Chipotle’s CEO admitted that some locations were “underscooping” to maximize profits.
People liked fast casual because it was affordable but delicious. It was not meant to be an upscale, froo-froo meal. As in, it’s one step over fast food. It’s a restaurant, but not a place where you get Happy Meals. Did they forget that somewhere along the way?
According to October 2023 data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, nearly 28 million adults nationwide — 12.5% of the adult population — were living in homes where there was either sometimes or often not enough to eat in the last week.
Quality tanking
This is not entirely the fault of the restaurant chain. Actual franchise owners care about their quality because it affects their ability to put food on their table. If they could, they would about-face on certain issues.
So why is quality an issue? It’s the fault of the investors who buy up the company stock on the stock market. When you are a publicly traded company, you have to maximize profits.
This is particularly true with the profits you show investors. Investors don’t care if your wings taste like cat food. They just care that they are cheaply made and sold at a profit.
If enough people stop eating at those venues, investors will start to care. Of course, investors and companies can’t always put toothpaste back in the tube. Generally speaking, once a chain loses its quality, it stays bad.
It’s hard to get in the good graces of high-end distributors once you write them off. It’s also hard to scale food portions up without making the prices even higher — especially when commercial property rents are skyrocketing.
Chain restaurants were once popular because you could rely on them for decent food. The good quality you’d get in California was the same good quality you’d get in Arkansas. Unfortunately, most became known for universally bad quality.
So, that’s where most companies are right now. They dropped their quality in hopes that people wouldn’t mind and hoped no one would stop going to their restaurants. People noticed (shocker!) and now don’t like chain restaurants.
A study conducted by New York-based brand and customer loyalty and engagement consultancy Brand Keys reported a 20% decrease in visits to fast food chains from millennials, with 13% indicating that they felt fast food was, indeed, “edible” but not much more than that.
Oliver Sjöström | Pexels
Fees, fees, fees
Did you ever look up how much it takes to open up a fast-casual restaurant? I did. Here’s the scorecard for a handful of them:
- A Buffalo Wild Wings franchise will cost between $2.5 to $4.5 million to start. That’s according to the BWW site.
- A TGI Friday’s costs between $2.7 million to $4.5 million to open. That’s per a franchising sales site.
- Chipotle requires an initial investment between $1.2 to $2.8 million. An up-and-coming competitor noted they cost less than half of that.
A good rule of thumb is that most franchises will require at least $1 million in liquid cash to kick up. I also noticed that more established national chains tend to require far more than up-and-coming local franchises.
You might be wondering why franchises are so incredibly pricey to open up. It’s simple: many of those companies make money from the licensing. The price of insurance also goes up because there are more locations and therefore more “moving parts.”
Moreover, doing national advertising and marketing on behalf of franchise owners is expensive. If you don’t believe me, check out how much a single commercial on TV costs. The bigger and more well-known the chain is, the more it costs to keep all the locations open. All those fees add up and start slicing the profit margins thinner and thinner. Eventually, the fees make it hard to run a business — especially when the quality nosedived the way it did with most chains.
Not understanding their customers
This is a major issue with both fast food and fast-casual restaurants. McDonald’s is the poster boy of this/ I knew McDonald’s was going to post a global loss soonish, and it did this year in 2024. Why? It’s because McDonald’s has no clue who their real market is or who it should be.
McDonald’s has consistently made moves that push their core demographic away at a time when they should be thriving — especially in America. People loved McDonald’s because it was cheap and you still had some kind of human interaction there.
Today? We have a bunch of screens to take orders, the price of a combo meal is roughly the same as a sit-down restaurant, and the food lacks. There used to be PlayPlaces. Those were scrapped, giving parents little incentive to bring their kids there.
The people who were wailing about McDonald’s being unhealthy were never McDonald’s core demographic. They were already eating salads at Chopt. And yet, McDonald’s made menu changes to be more “healthy.” Why? Because they were afraid of losing people who rarely went there in the first place.
We are seeing the end of a casual fast food era — or so it seems
Big Business has made a killing stepping on the toes of clients. Unfortunately for restaurant franchises, they started to kill off their industry through greedflation and a lack of common sense.
Unlike real estate and grocery stores, we don’t need chain restaurants. This is doubly true when the food is categorically worse than what one could get at a local mom-and-pop shop.
I never thought I’d say this, but I’m ready to say goodbye to the era of national chain fast-casual restaurants. They managed to destroy themselves in a truly spectacular, money-guzzling manner.
Ossiana Tepfenhart is a writer whose work has been featured in Yahoo, BRIDES, Your Daily Dish, Newtheory Magazine, and others.