What the US Economy Needs Is a Cheap Date
Before the pandemic, eating out was an affordable luxury. Now it has become expensive, and a lot of Americans are feeling the strain.
An increasingly unaffordable luxury.
Photographer: Ella Hovsepian/Getty Images North AmericaPlease indulge me in some taxi-driver reporting (or, in this case, ride-share driver reporting): A few months ago, traveling in a city cheaper than New York, my driver told me that he and his wife had a weekly date night. It was nothing fancy — a sit-down restaurant for a burger and a beer — but it now cost about $80, after tax and tip, twice what it was pre-pandemic. Yes, he told me, he earns more, but not that much more, and date night was becoming a financial strain.
There has been a lot of theorizing about why so many Americans feel worse off economically. True, real wages are now finally increasing, the labor market is great, the stock market is up, and consumers are spending. But none of this amounts to a complete picture of Americans’ quality of life. And people will tend to think it has declined if things they value feel like a stretch.