What Life at the Tower is really like

Changes in the economy:: How restaurants have changed… October 6, 2009

Maybe living downtown presents a microcosm of our city, or maybe it does not cut all the way across it and I just notice it more because things appear to have changed more for my friends and family than for others…

Not long ago we ate out probably five nights a week. Each weekend we’d look at the social calendar for the next week before deciding what groceries were really needed and what we still had not eaten from the week before that was still safe to eat. Now we generally stay home at least five nights because business is not what it was a few weeks ago, a few months ago and certainly not a few years ago!

Immediate seating in restaurants still depends on where you go and what time you get there, but moreover I have noticed that their younger clientele are still eating, drinking and having the party, while many of us whose children are old enough to be required to present their ID to the waitress are dwindling.  I don’t mean to say any of us are old…um… or even older…. It’s like last week when my son said, “Mom, I don’t think of you as old…” and I winked, saying, “You mean ‘yet,’ don’t you?”

Some of us have noticed trends which help to explain this — the first is that I was expecting to return to the classroom this fall, yet it seems that the economy has caused far more new teachers than in the past. (I’ve been told that some districts had over 150 applicants for each open position.) New teachers are not paid as much as those with years in the school system, so hiring a new teacher saves funding for principals. I’ve heard that the trend is not to hire people who are over 30 just now… there are plenty of younger ones who have less experience. So those who are less experienced now have the jobs,  and are out at the restaurants spending their pay —- the pay I am not getting, in other words .

Another thing I have noticed over the years is the increasing noise in restaurants. Once the noise level in a public place told a story about the type of place it was —- classy versus brassy. The higher priced restaurants downtown, for example Del Frisco, are just as noisy as any other these days. Chances are that means it is society which has changed. People are not taught manners as they were once —- even your grandmother said so, remember?  Now it is not the number of decibels that tend to offend patrons, but the high-pitched cackling of feminine laughter, the older child who climbs half onto the table to drink their soft drink from the straw without picking up their glass, the thong straps hugging the cheeks of patrons’ above low-rise jeans as they sit with their backs to you. But mostly, it’s the cackle. That high-pitched, incessant cackle which pervades so many public places, especially at mealtime. It comes from various age groups, from all around the room.

Maybe it’s not such a bad thing not to be able to eat out so often…