Eating outside one's home has become something of an American art form.
With so many options, fares, ambiances and price points to choose from, if you live anywhere but the most remote of areas you could probably dine out every day of the week somewhere different and never get bored.
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But dining out is a luxury, and life generally is more expensive these days. According to the most recent consumer-spending report, people spent 0.2% less in October — a noteworthy change compared with September's 0.7% rise.
You could be cutting back on expenses everywhere, but nice-to-have options like your fine-dining budget might be among the first to go.
In 2022 food prices jumped 10.4% overall. It's too early to see how much food prices might jump in 2023 since we've still got just under a month to round out the year, but the figure isn't expected to decline much, if at all.
Data from the most recent Consumer Price Index show that the prices of many goods and services are higher. Here's how different items changed in price over the past 12 months:
- Food: up 3.3%
- Food at home: up 2.1%
- Food away from home: up 5.4%
- Energy: down 4.5%
- Electricity: up 2.4%
- New vehicles: up 1.9%
- Apparel: up 2.6%
- Medical care commodities: up 4.7%
- Shelter: up 6.7%
- Transportation services: up 9.2%
But for people who still enjoy dining out without pomp and circumstance, chain restaurants like fast-food shops, cafes, fast casuals and even drive-thrus might provide affordable options. It's a lot easier to ballpark the cost of your chicken cobb salad at a well-known chain than at the brand-new mom-and-pop restaurant down the road.
And with the rise of social media and Google and other social reviews, chains know they need to work that much harder to gain consumers' trust as they watch their wallets more closely.
Study: the best-reputed chain restaurants
A study conducted by SOCI, the San Diego marketing platform, used artificial intelligence to gather data from online reviews, questions, and other metrics to evaluate how chain restaurants' reputations stack up against their peers.
SOCI said it used more than 100 metrics to measure what it calls casual dining shops. It then ranked each chain on a scale of 100.
The top rated casual dining restaurants are:
- Cheesecake Factory: 75
- Olive Garden: 74
- Outback Steakhouse: 64
- Applebee's: 60
- California Pizza Kitchen: 58
- Buffalo Wild Wings: 58
- Denny's: 58
- Chili's Grill & Bar: 58
Full-service rated higher than quick-service
One notable trend SOCI's study revealed was that full-service dining (think: sit-down) scored higher on average than quick-service restaurants (fast food). The average full-service dining score measured 65, whereas the average quick-service restaurant scored just 45.
Interestingly, in a separate study SOCI conducted in 2023, fast-food chain Chick-fil-A scored the highest fast-food reputation, coming in at 66 on a scale of 100.
The big takeaway here is that prospective diners read reviews, and they matter, even for a brand that already seems like a household name.
"A restaurant's online reputation, therefore, has a profound impact on its success and its local visibility — how prominently it features in local search results and the likelihood it gets discovered by potential customers," SOCI's chief marketing officer, Monica Ho, said in a statement.
"As such, effectively managing online reputation becomes a strategic imperative for enhancing local visibility and driving business growth."
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