It was due to the Celebrity Chef "everyone has to be a professional chef" era that we're coming out of. People didn't want to change their eating habits, but they wanted to feel fancy like rich British food man on TV, so they started demanding gourmet experiences from restaurants that had no business attempting to offer gourmet experiences. Everybody fancied themselves a foodie without actually trying to go out to nice places.

[–] samus12345@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago

But places still serve the same crap from what I've seen. Is it just the prices that are "gourmet"?

[–] Wogi@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago

Nobody is demanding a fancy meal from McDonald's.

The fast food industry went all in on a bet about 20-30 years ago, and now they're starting to cash in.

They wanted to get people dependant on eating their crap every single day. They view not just each other as competition, but the concept of you cooking for yourself as direct competition for their crap. They want you sitting in their drive through 3 meals a day. They don't want you to even consider using your own kitchen.

Their food is designed to trigger an addictive response. The food is cheap too produce, and really not very appealing to even look at. And yet, drive by any random McDonald's at 1030 am and it will be 4 cars deep in the drive through.

Now that an entire generation and their kids are hooked, they can raise the prices until people can just barely afford it.

[–] TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee 2 points 8 months ago

All about the moola