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The Loaded Potato Skins come eight to an order, crispy at the edges, oozing with cheddar, and studded with glistening little nubs of bacon. They are a symphony of starch, fat, and salt, just as I remember them — eight little time capsules from an era of my life before I thought about words like “heirloom,” “artisanal,” or “house-cured.”
Beside me at the bar, a middle-aged blonde woman orders a shot of Patrón while her date watches ESPN on one of several televisions hovering above us. An older couple picks at an order of fajitas, the sizzle long gone, in silence. At the surrounding tables, a smattering of families and couples tuck into Jack Daniel's® Burgers and BBQ Chicken Flatbreads. A toddler bellows somewhere in the distance, while a couple of waitresses loiter by the kitchen. It is 7 p.m. on a Tuesday at TGI Fridays in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
I haven’t been to a TGI Fridays since Grey’s Anatomy was winning Emmys, and from the looks of things, neither have you. Casual dining chains — industry parlance for economical sit-down restaurants like Fridays, Applebee’s, Chili’s, and Buffalo Wild Wings — have subsisted in a dismal and persistent state of decline for about a decade. But in the last two years, things have gotten worse, with the number of people eating at casual dining chains overall falling every single month since June 2015; they are now the worst-performing segment of the entire restaurant industry. In recent months, Applebee’s has said it will close 135 locations this year; Buffalo Wild Wings will shed at least 60. Ruby Tuesday closed 109 restaurants last year, and put the whole company up for sale in March. Friendly’s, Bennigan’s, Joe’s Crab Shack, and Logan’s Roadhouse have all filed for bankruptcy.
Whatever your feelings about casual dining chains, they have been a vital part of the way that many Americans eat since the 1930s, when Howard Johnson began blanketing the highways with his trademark orange-and-teal restaurants — temples to affordable, quality fare in a wholesome setting. After plodding along for some 50 years, the genre exploded during the 1980s, as America entered a period of sustained economic growth and chains like Fridays, Olive Garden, and Applebee’s saturated suburban landscapes with their bland, softly corporate vision of good times and good food. While the brands and the fads have changed — RIP fried-clam sandwich, hello baby back ribs and buffalo sliders — the formula has remained more or less unchanged over the decades: middlebrow menu, solid value, and friendly service, consistently executed, from Pasadena to Tallahassee. Until recently, it was a formula that worked across cuisines, state lines, and demographics.
Casual dining’s current state of pain has mostly been blamed on millennials, who are characterized by the marketers who conjured them into being as nonconformist sriracha guzzlers, serial-killing every enduring cultural touchstone in their path, from fabric softener to handshakes. Millennials, the thinking goes, prefer to cook at home. But they also avoid eating cereal for breakfast because cleaning the bowl takes too much work. Millennials love chain restaurants but, paradoxically, like to seek out food that is “fresh, creative, and made just for them.” They place a higher value on convenience than their predecessors, preferring to grab a salad for dinner on Panera’s mobile app instead of sliding into a booth at Chili’s for a leisurely plate of baby back ribs. Then again, millennials are all about “fully immersive food experiences,” too? One thing about millennials is certain: Their habits are the straw man of choice for explaining anything in decline.
But if you focus less on generational shifts and look instead at economic data as a whole, a different theory emerges: TGI Fridays and Applebee’s and their ilk are struggling as the American middle class and its enormous purchasing power withers away in real time, with the country’s population dividing into a vast class of low-wage earners who cannot afford the indulgence of sit-down meal of Chili’s Mix & Match Fajitas and a Coke, and a smaller cluster of high-income households for whom a Jack Daniel’s sampler platter at Fridays is no longer good enough. At the same time, the rise of the internet, smartphones, and streaming media have changed the ways that consumers across the income spectrum choose to allocate our leisure time — and, by association, our mealtimes. In-home (and in-hand) entertainment has altered how we consume casual meals, making the Applebee’s and Red Lobsters of the world less and less relevant to the way America eats.
As casual dining restaurants collapse in on themselves, TGI Fridays remains — unfortunately for it — an emblem for the entire category: In 2014, after years of slipping sales, the chain was sold to a pair of private equity firms, Sentinel Capital Partners and TriArtisan Capital Advisors, which swiftly began offloading company-owned restaurants to franchisees, essentially stripping the business for parts. Meanwhile, the chain’s beleaguered management has attempted to turn things around with a series of highly publicized initiatives, like delivering booze. Most notably, last year, Fridays unveiled a new concept restaurant in Texas — a stunning reversal from the tchotchke-laden image savagely memorialized in Mike Judge’s 1999 cult classic Office Space — that’s heavy on neutral tones, pale wood, brick walls, and exceedingly mellow, indistinct furniture; it looks like a neglected airport lounge in Helsinki.
Here in Lancaster, however, the restaurant has maintained its traditional den-like vibe, dimly lit with dark wood and red vinyl booths, though the brand’s trademark ephemera — movie posters, road signs, album covers, maybe a pool cue or a pair of water skis that harken back to its days as a New York City singles bar — have been stripped from the walls, presumably in an effort to modernize. I look around at the few framed photographs that remain — stock images of neon cocktails that look as if they were photographed in outer space — then notice that some plastic leis and hula skirts have been taped to the bar, and an inflatable palm tree languishes in a corner.
“What’s with the Hawaiian, um, decor?” I ask the bartender between mouthfuls.
“Oh. They’re from this Summer Fridays promotion we’ve been doing? It’s over next week,” the bartender explains, and then adds, sotto voce, “Thank god, because it’s so tacky.”
At Fridays across the country, promotions like Summer Fridays are the front-line effort in enticing customers back beneath its candy-striped awnings, though the long-term result is a sort of death spiral of discounts and specials: There are Social Sundays, Mix It Mondays, $3 Tuesday Brewsdays, Martini Wednesdays, and $3 Throwback Thursdays. There are also Endless Apps — $10 for truly infinite Loaded Bacon Nachos or Pan-Seared Potstickers — which began as a limited-time offer but is now in itself Endless, a permanent marker of decline, forever fixed to the Fridays menu.
Narratives about chain restaurants tend to be told through data: changes in same store sales, rising or falling unit counts. But restaurant industry data — the kind that’s standardized and publicly available, at least — is a blunt tool at best. It can tell you that fewer meals were eaten at TGI Fridays during a given quarter, but it can’t tell you who ate those meals, much less whether those people were eating there more or less frequently, or how they feed themselves when they’re not partaking of Fridays’ deep-fried and thickly sauced bounty.
That’s how I found myself in Lancaster. While there’s no such thing as the typical American town, Lancaster, located in South Central Pennsylvania, an hour and a half west of Philadelphia by car, might be described as a typical American town, with demographic trends shared by many communities across the country. The Lancaster metropolitan area, which stretches 20 miles on all sides of a modest downtown, has a population of around 500,000, making it the 90th largest of America’s 227 major metropolitan areas, as defined by the Pew Research Group. In 2016, Pew used United States census data to analyze income trends on a city-by-city basis; median household income in Lancaster is $66,843 per year, slightly above the national average of $59,039. And as America at large, though majority white, Lancaster is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse over time.
Also like America as a whole, the distribution of wealth in Lancaster is shifting. In 2000, 64 percent of the metro area’s population classified as “middle income” — those with incomes between two-thirds and double the median amount. As of 2014, that number decreased to 57 percent; Lancaster’s middle class is shrinking.
The TGI Fridays in Lancaster is located in the Park City Center, a mammoth shopping mall that’s located a couple of miles outside of the city proper. The restaurant announces itself with a quartet of red-and-white awnings, a signature of the brand, facing the mall’s yawning parking lot. A glowing red sign still bears the original spelling — “T.G.I. FRIDAY’S,” using punctuation that was officially abandoned in 2013. The Lancaster location dates to 1989, the beginning of two decades of expansion that ballooned the chain to more than 900 units internationally.
It may be an overstatement to say that Fridays was Lancaster’s hottest dining destination in the 1990s, but it was a prime contender for any dinner eaten away from the home. At the time, Fridays had little competition from local outfits. Independent restaurants tend to locate themselves in city centers, and Lancaster’s had emptied out in the period following World War II; during the ’90s, it was full of abandoned storefronts and run-down townhouses. Dave Lubkemman, a financial services executive who spent his teen years in Lancaster, recalls the local sit-down options back then as a regional steakhouse chain called Hoss’s Family Steak & Seahouse, Fridays, Friendly’s, Olive Garden, and the Ponderosa Steakhouse. When he took a girl out on his first date in high school, he took her to Fridays.
Sherry Qualls, an interior design publicist who has lived in Lancaster since the 1980s, also remembers the casual dining chain’s cache during its cultural peak in the ’90s. “I always worked in town, but the carpet was rolled up at 6 p.m.,” Qualls told me. “On your way home to your suburban home, you picked up your kids at karate, and you grabbed something quick at TGI Fridays.”
One of the most evident changes to Lancaster between then and now has been a dramatic revitalization of the city center, which is a five-minute drive from TGI Fridays. After decades of neglect, today the city looks like the fever dream of a 30-something graphic designer recently priced out of Williamsburg. There is a small but immaculate downtown, filled with cold brew-slinging coffee shops, clothing boutiques, and over a dozen art galleries. Red-brick warehouses and factories have been converted into condos and boutique hotels and offices for small but intimidating architecture firms. The city now has a minor-league baseball team, the Barnstormers, as well as a new convention center. Walking around downtown Lancaster, you can buy vintage vinyl, cold-pressed green juice, and craft beer, all within a three-block radius. Many members of the so-called “creative class” — advertising executives, writers, musicians, professors — have migrated to Lancaster from larger cities, while retirees have resettled here, with money to spend.
Today’s Lancaster is also marked by the essential feature of virtually every American urban revival: a growing number of small, independent, farm-to-table restaurants serving food that’s a cut above corporate casual dining fare. Young professionals can dine on New Zealand lamb Bolognese at the modern French bistro Citronnelle, wood-fired Neapolitan pizzas at Luca, or a sesame ginger shrimp rice bowl at Silantra Street Kitchen. Nationwide, between 2008 and 2016, chains overall lost 14 percent of their foot traffic to independent restaurants — defined as concepts that span no more than two units — according to the data analytics company TDn2K. “We now have a large number of chefs who have graduated from culinary schools, which was not true 20 years ago,” Malcolm Knapp, a restaurant industry analyst, told me. “They can open up a 50- or 60-seater, husband-wife team, and produce really good food and it's fairly affordable.”
One of the most popular places in downtown Lancaster is a wine bar called Pour, where, for a little more than the cost of the Loaded Potato Skins and a Sam Adams at Fridays, you can get a Pilsner brewed in Lancaster and a plate of apple cider-glazed Berkshire pork belly. “You don't get the same stuff all the time, and it doesn't feel like it's coming out of a package in the back room, microwaved, and thrown on the plate,” Qualls, the interior design publicist, told me. “There's that emotional connection that, thinking back to the ’90s, you didn’t have at TGI Fridays.”
The rise of craft culture and destination dining has created a highly visible challenge to casual dining restaurants over the past decade — but data suggest that not everybody is out splurging on grass-fed steak. Drive less than a quarter mile from the sweetshops and wine bars of downtown Lancaster and you’ll find row houses in various states of disrepair, some in need of a fresh coat of paint, others badly deteriorated, with broken windows and sagging porches piled up with disused toys and furniture. “While a narrative has emerged about the urban renewal success of the City, mostly focused on Center City and the Arts, the reality is that the economic conditions of many City residents have largely grown worse in terms of opportunities and outcomes,” concluded a 2015 report about Lancaster out of the Floyd Institute for Public Policy at Franklin & Marshall College. Since 2000, the percentage of city residents who are working, and who are in mid-level-paying occupations, has actually decreased.
An average meal at a casual dining chain costs around $14 per person. For an increasing number of people in Lancaster, that is out of reach — and if anything, is slipping further away. In fact, a larger proportion of the Lancaster metro area’s population has dropped into a lower income band (3.8 percent) than has moved into a higher one (3.2 percent) — nationally, those numbers were 2 percent and 3 percent respectively. “The top reason why casual dining is declining is that income is flat,” Knapp, the restaurant consultant, said. “Half of America lives paycheck to paycheck.” For the average wage earner, incomes peaked in 2000, and have been down on an inflation-adjusted basis ever since. The wealth (defined as assets minus debt) held by middle-income households fell by 28 percent between 2001 and 2013. TGI Fridays’ core customer is feeling squeezed.
In the sprawling office parks and strip malls on the city’s outskirts, there are plenty of places to feed oneself more cheaply than at TGI Fridays or Applebee’s, from the legacy fast food players — Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Burger King — where a meal still costs around $5, to Wawa, a regional gas station and convenience store chain with a cult following that sells hoagies and sandwiches for around the same price. (There was a line at the counter on the day that I passed through.) Lancaster’s Taco Bell, which serves some of the cheapest food you can buy anywhere, seems to be doing a particularly brisk business. National data suggest that Lancaster is not an anomaly here: Same-store sales overall at Taco Bell grew 8 percent in the first quarter of 2017, at a time when visits to restaurants overall showed no growth; quick-service restaurant revenues overall grew by 25 percent in the period between 2002 and 2014.
Then there are the fast-casual restaurants — brands like Panera and Chipotle — which have flooded into Lancaster in recent years, doing their own part to gobble up market share from casual dining outfits. Here, meals run in the $7-11 range, but the food quality is good enough to inspire unapologetic fandom of the sort that doesn’t typically accompany counter-service dining. Chick-fil-A straddles the line between fast casual and regular fast food, with check averages hovering just above $7; when I visited the Lancaster location at lunchtime on a Monday, cars were stacked up at the restaurant’s two-lane drive-thru or circling the lot looking for spots. At the nearby Applebee’s, just two tables were occupied. On a national level, sales at fast-casual restaurants grew 550 percent between 1999 and 2014 (although the dollar volume is still a small share of the restaurant industry overall); fast-casual sales are expected to continue growing by at least 10 percent per year between now and 2020. Whatever the reasons one might have to spend less on a meal — a desire for sheer, undiluted value, or higher-quality food without the trappings — there’s no shortage of better places to spend those dollars.
TGI Fridays started out in 1965 as a radical concept: a single’s bar on the Upper East Side. “Before TGI Fridays, four single 25-year-old girls were not going out on Friday nights, in public and with each other, to have a good time,” Fridays founder Alan Stillman claimed in a 2010 interview. Bars were, at the time, still male-dominated spaces; Stillman decorated his with domestic flourishes like colorful Tiffany-style lamps and framed photographs and dressed his waiters in jaunty red-and-white-striped soccer shirts to put young women at ease. When Fridays catapulted to chain status through a licensing deal in the 1970s, its identity evolved to include families, but the idea of party atmosphere — a phantasm of an exuberant and welcoming gathering place — remains in its DNA.
As a teenager growing up in the suburbs of New York in the late 1990s, this is what drew me in. Applebee’s had a wholesome, value-oriented vibe, and Outback Steakhouse, with its dazzling Bloomin’ Onions and char-grilled steaks, was special-occasion fare, well beyond a teenager’s everyday budget. TGI Fridays was where the kids at my high school went. We ordered Diet Cokes and shared sizzling fajitas or mozzarella sticks, the kind of greasy, indulgent bar food that you couldn’t get at home (at least not until TGI Fridays starting hawking its deep-fried greatest hits in the freezer aisle), passing the time, away from the parental gaze, for about the price of going to the movies.
Ten years ago, around the same time as traffic to casual dining chains turned persistently negative, two other things happened: Apple invented the iPhone, and Netflix launched its streaming video service. Consumers who were drawn to TGI Fridays in previous decades not just for sustenance, but as a form of entertainment, may no longer be looking to restaurants to fulfill that role with the same frequency. Why go sit in a pleather booth and stare at each other when you can hide under a blanket and text while watching Game of Thrones? We know from the data that teenagers in particular are increasingly homebound — they wait longer to get their driver’s licenses and go out on fewer dates. In 2015, seniors in high school were going out less often than were eighth graders six years earlier.
The iPhone gets blamed for destroying quite a lot — from the music industry to our brain chemistry — but the timing of the smartphone’s rise and casual dining’s decline does seem particularly suspicious. Other data on dining habits supports the idea that these days, people simply prefer to be entertained in the comfort of their own homes. Despite what the Food Network would lead you to believe, Americans aren’t cooking more. According to the market research firm NPD Group, the proportion of meals that Americans source from restaurants has hovered close to 20 percent for the past three decades. In other words, we’re just ordering more of those meals for delivery: Orders for foods other than pizza have risen by 30 percent in the last four years, according to NPD. And at Domino’s, where most of the orders are eaten off-premise, same-store sales for the most recent quarter rose an eye-watering 10 percent — no doubt in part because Domino’s delivery technology is as good as any Silicon Valley startup. Even drive-thru traffic as a whole is on the rise as sophisticated mobile ordering apps for chains like Starbucks and Chick-fil-A improve the experience by reducing wait times and bypassing the need to bellow into that drive-thru loudspeaker.
This is bad news for casual dining restaurants. Most offer their food packaged to go, and more and more have begun to embrace delivery, including Fridays, Chili’s, Maggiano’s, and Outback. But their menus have been designed for sit-down service — those sizzling fajitas, the ice-cold margaritas! — and eating in is sort of the whole point. Nachos and mozzarella sticks don’t take kindly to half an hour steaming inside a delivery box. If you want a hamburger on the couch while watching Neo Yokio, there’s no clear reason to spend $10 at Fridays when you can get one from Five Guys that’s just as good, if not better, for less money and less hassle.
Many of the people to whom I mentioned this story while writing it responded with some variation on “good riddance.” The general feeling seemed to be that TGI Fridays was overdue for extinction. In an era before Yelp, casual dining chains stood out as an alternative to the unpredictability of independent restaurants, especially for tourists and business travelers; they were national brands that promised a standardized level of execution and a menu weighted toward crowd-pleasers. Now, for many, they represent instead only corporate homogeneity, a soulless alternative to smaller businesses offering superior freshness and quality.
Casual dining chains are, I think, a holdover from a time and place where large swaths of Americans, from across the economic spectrum, could all pretty much find something to like at a Fridays or a Red Lobster. Though imperfect, they aspired to be democratic concepts, with cheeseburgers and beer and brownie sundaes that were just good enough — and yet cheap enough — to reach and please if not everyone, then most people. Today, we live in an increasingly economically polarized country, and that is mirrored in where we eat. For the haves, there are painstakingly curated farm-to-table bistros; for the have-nots, $4 tacos dusted with Doritos flavoring, or maybe, one day, Soylent. But food can be a potent form of shared culture, even from a giant multinational chain — mozzarella sticks, cheese biscuits, and buffalo wings form a common culinary ground — so having these touch points with one another is not so immaterial: We lose something if we lose TGI Fridays, and it’s more than just the Loaded Potato Skins.
All coverage of the slow decline of the middling suburban chain.>>
Elizabeth G. Dunn is a writer living in Harlem who covers the business of food and drink. Her work appears in The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Entrepreneur, among other publications.
Laura Watilo Blake is a photojournalist based in the Cleveland area.
Copy edited by Rachel P. Kreiter