No, ‘Millennials’ Didn’t Kill Chain Restaurants

The last few years have not been kind to chain restaurants across the world. TGI Friday’s has shut down tons of locations due to dwindling customer numbers and footfall. Applebees has announced it’ll close 135 restaurants this year. And companies like Friendly’s, Bennigans and Joe’s Crab Shack have all filed for bankruptcy.

So as they usually do, the media went out looking for ‘explanations’ for this phenomena. Some figured it was ‘millennials’, stating that those mythical young people out there don’t like the old standbys any more. Some said it was the middle class becoming rarer due to economic hardships. Explanation after explanation has cropped up everywhere online.

But they all miss the bloody obvious. TGI Friday’s and Applebees aren’t failing because of some ‘social’ trend.

They’re failing because they’re crap. That’s it. That’s all there is to it.

Seriously, when was the last time you ate at one of these places? Probably about a decade ago when some clueless relative looked for a cheap place to host a birthday party or something. You never went there on a regular basis, let alone more than once every few months or so.

And you never went there on a regular basis because the whole restaurant is absolutely awful. The food sucks, consisting mostly of pre-cooked meals quickly heated up in a microwave behind the scenes. The atmosphere sucks, with the interior design hearkening back to a style that died out decades ago. Even the customer service is often poor, with employees who don’t really care about their job and with nothing but bad words to say about their employers.

All of these things have been terrible for years, and gotten even worse as the years go on. Unless you’re in an area with really poor alternatives, these establishments are simply not worth eating at.

So why did they become popular earlier on?

Well, for a few reasons really.

Reason 1 is that the quality was indeed better in the olden days. Sure they weren’t ever ‘good’ cuisine by any stretch of imagination, but there was genuine effort early on.

And that’s not the only reason either. Others include:

1. How safe the restaurants and food were overall. In other words… if you had a large party and you wanted a cheap place where everyone could find something they’d be able to eat, these were okay options.
2. Good location choices, which put them right in the middle of busy high streets, next to cinemas or in highly trafficked malls. If you wanted to get food quickly and you didn’t want to think about where you to eat, these places did work to fill a void.
3. A certain few people associating the ‘idea’ of a restaurant with ‘quality’ in general, and just going back to the same ones they were used to over and over again.

But these benefits have now all died out. The convenient locations are now becoming a lot less so, with both cinemas and shopping centres losing popularity due to online shopping. Being a safe choice has lost a lot of its appeal, with people realising that there’s more they can eat than just burgers, chips and pizza. The folks who used to frequent the same tired establishments over and over again are either getting more savvy about them or just not going out as much for whatever reason.

And when you add healthy eating to the list (something that’s caused quite the downturn in the popularity of fast food joints like McDonalds and Burger King as well), you’ve got a situation where these types of restaurants just don’t work any more. They just don’t appeal to the same audiences they used to, and better competitors are (apologies for the pun) eating their lunch.

So no, neither millennials nor the middle class are killing these restaurants. Plain poor food and service in general is.