Diana and I went to our local Outback restaurant the other day, while Simon was at the parks. I don't remember how we ended up with a gift card, but ordinarily this isn't a place we would go. In fact, we don't really go to national casual chains very often in the general sense. There are just better options with better food (not to mention a ton of great restaurants on the theme park properties). Outback was fine. You can't really screw up chicken and a baked potato, as long as they're seasoned right.
There was a time though, in Cleveland, where I would frequently visit the big chains. This was before the foodie scene started to expand there, and before the chains seemed to mostly just microwave all of their crappy food. Stephanie and I periodically went to Outback as part of a cycle that included Best Buy. That was in my buy-lots-of-crap phase. And I know we went there on credit sometimes, too.
The crazy thing that I remember was putting your name in and hanging out, sometimes for a half-hour or more, to get a table. That's nuts. If we went anywhere today, if there was anything more than a 10-minute wait, we'd turn around and go somewhere else. We were so tolerant then of waiting. This would happen at TGI Friday's too (again, when the food was OK). I vividly remember going outside if it wasn't too cold, because I couldn't deal with waiting in a crowded, noisy area inside.
The other variable is the invention of fast casual, where it's not exactly fast food, but it's not a sit-down restaurant either. Chipotle is likely the most brilliant example of this, where they have real and fresh food, but there others. A lot of them have come and gone, but Pei Wei is still a thing, and locally we have a sushi/fusion place called Bento. These are not the crappy fast food stuffs like McDonald's or Wendy's. It's measurably better stuff, and oddly enough not that much more expensive than a McMeal. As a percentage, those places get more money from me than regular sit-down joints, and fast food is off the table completely.
I never really noticed the change, it happened so gradually.
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