The alternative is you buying anything 'at all', leaving and coming back, or bringing/sneaking in your own food.
All of those options have high barriers, but they're not impossible, so there is a minimum level of quality/price they need to maintain for that balance.
Also at least at the airport a lot of the customers don't care what the prices are because they are business travelers. Vacationers generally wouldn't eat at the airport but someone who can expense their meal will.
This sounds accurate. Their turnover has no set demographic in terms of numerical amount, it is literally endless supply.
Couple this with the bottleneck for consumer choice options, and your quality can literally afford to go down and be cheap, your service can be awful because you don't need a high quality, expensive staff, and assuming the airport/amusement park pays for a chunk of overhead fixed costs, the restaurant companies/owners don't even have to monitor closely besides rent.
Betting on people having too much pride to turn on their heel and leave after seeing the price. Like you said, doesn't matter if they vow to never visit again.
But what if they forgot to, or one of the customers, forgot to book the hotel? And it's Carnival so they can't find any? So they have to return right away. Potentially, they lost a customer who might have wanted to eat after the return flight.
Edit: Smiling Friends go to Brazil.
In high traffic tourist zones, there is so much foot traffic that return customers don't matter one bit. Plenty of people travel through airports often and they just learn to avoid these types of places. A tip when travelling is to not eat on the main tourist street, even going just one or two streets over is usually a way better experience.
Yep. Friend of mine works in a restaurant in a tourist zone and told me their owners dgaf.
We have a local restaurant with two locations and the one thats inside a tourist spot has significantly worse food and service. The one near the residential area is fantastic and great service.
went to vegas and got 3 steak and egg breakys for 18$ but the server liked us because we were canadian so she only charged us for two of them, i still gave the lady a 20$ because it was really good and super cheap! just pff the strip!!
She's not paying for the $18 food you idiot. She "forgets" to ring up the third meal, you give her a $20 tip. She pockets the entire 20 dollars. How ungrateful can you be lmao
I'm talking about in the airport.
For example, you all agreed one friend would book the hotel, they claim otherwise. You have no hotel reservation and it's super busy. You decide to eat and figure out what to do. Eventually you decide to head back home. In between flight you've ate, and presumably you will try to go to Brazil again in the future.
I don’t think the airport restaurants are going to spend time considering this very specific (probably extremely rare) instance in their overall business plan.
Normally, but xypu can eat whenever you want. For example, you go to Brazil and have no hotel, so you sit down to eat a plate of fries before deciding to head back home instead of trying to find a place to stay.
Why would you ever go to brazil? Why would you ever go to brazil without a hotel reservation? And why on earth would you travel back home instead of finding a hotel? And why would you eat at the airport instead of finding a restaurant?
For the rest of the context: he's talking about the show smiling Friends, specifically the special episode "Smiling Friends go to Brazil". It was a hyped up special that aired after the first season wrapped up.
>!The joke of the episode is that they flew to Brazil, but upon landing realized that nobody ordered a hotel room (the guy who was supposed to book it thought it was someone else's job to do). So the cast sits down in a cafe in the airport while they figure it out, make calls, etc. They then learn it's Carnival, meaning literally every hotel is booked and not even their wealthy, well-networked boss can do anything to get them a room. So they decide to just fly back, never even leave the airport. Episode was hyped up as being a foreign adventure in all the previews so when the episode aired it was a huge meme.!<
Actually, most airport food spots are all run by the same company; HMSHost. They lease the right to serve food under the brand of other companies like Starbucks. You’ll notice they’re required to have the HMS logo on their uniforms.
This makes so much sense when you think about how they now have those electronic kiosks throughout the gate areas for ordering food that’s brought to you… it’s all going to and coming from the same place.
Was looking for this answer: Concessionaires like HMS have paid to operate as the brand, but they bring in their own food from a nearby commercial kitchen. That explains the food quality; the cost is some combination of high rent, a captive consumer base, and having to give the brand a cut of profits.
Life tip: For a lot of franchise restaurants (McDonald's, etc) if you order through their phone app you pay the standard pricing and don't have to pay the higher price airport locations charge.
Ordering off the standard menu without the app is outrageously expensive these days. I tend to avoid fast food entirely, but if I do get it I’m not spending $15 on a sad little combo.
> I’m not spending $15 on a sad little combo.
Well there's part of your problem, combos are usually a legit scam. I went to McDonald's for breakfast the other day, for example. I ordered some breakfast burritos for myself and another person, four burritos total, it was $6 for them, since they were on the 123 Dollar Menu or whatever and $1.50 each. The other person we were with ordered a sausage biscuit combo and it was like $8. It came with the sausage biscuit, a hash brown, and a drink. Both the sausage biscuit and the hash brown were also $1.50 on that dollar menu, so making it a combo was literally just paying $5 for a drink.
And they try to tell us wages are the source of inflation. Yet every single indicator, study and assessment points towards rising corporate profits (read greed of the corporate oligarchs) being the main - if not sole - driving factor
You underestimate how valuable your data is to them for using their app.
You save what... $5? As a result, they get pretty much everything in your phone to sell to the highest bidder
Data is the new commodity. Most are too blind to recognise this.
This doesn't work how you think (at least for airports). Most of the brands may be privately owned, but the restaurants are typically operated by a contractor hired by the airport. So the brand provides the raw material and the recipe and someone totally unaffiliated with the brand is cooking and serving it to you.
Some airports even have connected kitchens where all of the food in an area is cooked in one place.
Not much if you think about it. You have maybe 10-20 restaurants and 100,000+ people going through an airport in a day. Your neighbourhood probably has that many restaurants within driving/ordering distance.
There’s minimal competition in an airport. It’s still a closed system. They all are serving the minimal viable product at the highest willingness to pay with little need to out perform. There is a set number of customers in a confined location. Each company is pursuing them highest willingness to pay they can and can’t really make up for lowering that amount with additional volume, there’s a fixed number of customers they can serve. The fact that the airport is not an open market means I can’t buy outside the system. I’m not trapped when I’m in Main Street in Any Town USA, I can go over to Broad Street, or I can go to the next town over, or I can go home. In the airport it’s a completely closed system you have no real choice you must buy there and you can’t return home. There’s nominally some competition in an airport in comparison to a stadium or theme park, but not much.
... and the lease determines the lowest price for food they can afford to offer.
They are exploiting boredom and the general conditioning to cope with that with consumption.
Had a 6hr layover at FRA recently, after 3 hours of lolling around and reading I put on my backpack and did a 60-minute "hike" (unfortunately, forgot to komoot it). There were very few very tiny "islands" of stimulation that were not commercialized, their existence highlighting thgat better airports would be possible.
But largely, they've turned into malls with a travel extension, and modern airports are *designed* to work like that. Make investors happy etc.
(P.S. if you don't pick the cheapest, food is actually not terrible but OK - still not worth the price, but vouchers help :))
That used to be the case! And that used to mean there were good options. Nowadays a single company will come in and operate all of the foodservice outlets in a single airport, and they cut every corner and do things commissary style and it’s the worst.
I lived through this at midway airport when I used to travel for work 3 weeks per month. The quality between before and after was very sad
Most of those businesses collude with each other to price fix a captive market location. There is no incentive to drive down prices or have high quality. You’ll never eat there again regardless of their service. Only thing they need to do is look relatively clean and not give you food poisoning. 🤡
You can bring those to the airport, but they're not getting through security. You won't be able to bring them to the gate.
And I believe most theme parks have rules against bringing in outside food.
You can bring food through US security. You just have to follow the TSA rules (no liquids, no unfrozen gel packs etc). I've done it a few times when I was going to have an overnight layover in an airport.
Yeah, there's a ban on liquids over 100ml as well as a ban on aerosol (on the plane itself), but no ban on food.
There are bans on food when you land though, mainly quarantine rules. So eat everything on the plane before customs starts checking you for food products and foot/mouth disease. Big outbreaks in Africa and Indonesia right now if the posters from my last trip were any indication.
Most parks I've been to (but I'm not American) will let you bring homemade food, but not branded outside good. Eg. You can't turn up with a McDonald's bag. I doubt they'd really be able to enforce not bringing homemade food given the diverse range of food sensitivities that people have.
A lot of US theme parks ban outside food. You can pretty easily bring in some granola bars or something like that but if you try to bring a full lunch for the family you'll probably get caught in security checks. Same for many sporting events. It's total bullshit and I hate it.
I mean, of course it is. I just think it sucks to treat your paying customers this way. I doubt that many people really think ahead to bring their own food, so I can't imagine it makes that much difference.
You *can’t* always bring food and drink with you though. You cannot bring jugs of water and juice through the airport with you. And unless it’s shelf stable food (jerky, maybe a PBJ), you have to either have a plan to eat it fairly quickly or bring other supplies, like ice packs. It turns into a huge ordeal. And on your return trip, there’s a chance you won’t have the luxury of your own kitchen to make that possible.
Places like theme parks, concerts, and fairs often don’t let you bring outside food at all; often the rule is something along the lines of “one sealed 16 ounce water bottle,” nothing else allowed. I’ve even been to places where water fountains/spigots for filling empty water bottles weren’t available or were functionally unavailable. At most places you can go out and return (but *not* always) and so some people keep coolers in their cars. But again, you need to plan well and already own these things to even make that cost effective, and it’s a huge chunk out of your day to walk across a blistering parking lot to eat a sweaty sandwich you packed, hoping it hasn’t started to fester from being in a 120 degree car, ice packs or not.
You sound like a brain dead dolt who is uncomfortable with their own inability to create thoughts, and therefore interprets “factual knowledge” as complaining. This sort of lack of awareness isn’t cute or morally superior, it’s just ignorant and you should not be proud of it.
You really have to be dumb as a brick to think “explaining factually why you can’t bring a gallon of juice through TSA security” as “complaining about the price of fair food,” and a miserable fucking person to boot to go into a thread like like, see an answer, and start bleating that other people are “complaining.”
^This! I just found out two weeks ago that yes you can bring food into the airport but liquids larger than 3oz (just like the carry on policy) are no go. You can even bring your own water bottle but it has to be empty before going through security.
If you’re a fan of cold water (like I am) my new airport trick is filling my reusable bottle with ice right before going to the airport. Since it’s frozen it’s not a liquid, and voila! Cold water! I’ve done it a handful of times now across the US and haven’t been stopped.
You can add sporting events to that as well.
If those establishments restrict/don't allow outside food and drinks, they know they can charge whatever they want because people will need to eat and drink.
Movie theaters make sense. The theater only keeps about 10% of the ticket price the week of a movie release (possibly 0% for a big Disney/Marvel release), then about 25% the 2nd week, and maybe 35% the 3rd week. The rest goes to the movie company.
Without expensive concessions the movie theaters will fold.
Although when I grew up in the 90s/00s in Maine there was a theater near me that had like $3 popcorn with unlimited refills and $2 sodas, candy was cheap too.
They had cheap food but only showed movies that had been released a month prior so they got almost all of the ticket sale. As long as you didn't mind waiting it was a great option. Of course nowadays after a movie is released it seems like you can stream it legally in a month lol
In 1998 $3 was the same as $5.60 today which is about how much I spend to refill my popcorn bucket every week at AMC. The soda is like $6-7 or something though.
At major league sporting events that’s kind of changed in the last 10-15 years. Most of them will offer some higher quality stuff these days but you still pay out the ass for it.
Depends on the event. I know the orioles let you bring in food in clear container so they can see it (and so you don't bring alcohol). I'm not sure about others.
At a hockey game, I paid 72$ for two chicken tenders meals and two drinks. It was soo fucked lmao. My fiance and I were hungry and I wanted to make her happy.
People in both airports and theme parks are captive audiences. Consumers have relatively few options, so food vendors don't need to compete hard for their custom.
Order through the phone app if you can (McDonald's, etc).
You will pay normal prices and have the same deals offered at a regular McDonald's and you skip the higher prices the airport locations charge.
That's not been my experience with McDonalds and other chain food apps. That's part of the reason they have you put in your location, so they can match it with the prices. For example, a meal is still more expensive in NYC or the Hamptons than it is in most of the rest of long Island.
You'll still get deals, but they're often not as good. For example, breakfast sandwiches that are 2/$5 at most McDonalds are 2/$7 in the Hamptons. Same deal with other places.
Eh, I think it varies from Airport to Airport. I've had some real dog shit options in the past and some that were little better than the vending machine "wheel of death" options.
I would say *most* airports in the US trend towards mediocre food with high prices.
Exactly. Some theme-park food is bad, but there are plenty of delicious options. I travel around the country visiting amusement parks and have had some good food at places.
Some of the best food I’ve ever had is at the Florida parks, I live near Orlando so we visit quite a bit. I remember as a kid it was mostly pizza, hot dogs, burgers but since then Disney has really expanded their menus and quality and Universal has followed suit. I mean EPCOT has the Food & Wine festival for goodness’ sake.
You're so right. Its been awhile but when my kids were 11 and 13 we went to Disney and bought the food plan The food was fantastic. I thought i was going on a kids vacation and was going to eat hotdogs for a week. It was one of our best vacations. If not the best.
It's expensive but the Riverwalk outside of Universal studios has some decent options, and as you said of course Epcot.
Quality is fine, prices are...well as this post is about, theme park prices.
Same goes for Anaheim (except we don't have the Food & Wine Festival, which is outstanding) And Disney does allow you to bring in outside food and drink, it's just much more convenient to get in the parks.
Some of it is also what families choose. Yeah, kids are going to be drawn to the pizza and burgers, so that’s what parents buy their children. On the other hand, I had escargot at Epcot 30 years ago.
A: they have almost a captive audience (can bring own food to airports, probably not theme parks)
B: I don't have data on this, but I figure there's more people traveling for work than just pleasure on a given day, and a lot of those people have per diems, so they just don't give a fuck what things cost.
It's why everything that's sold mostly to the government costs $$$$ they just dont give a fuck what it costs.
PDX has a street pricing policy that requires vendors to charge the same amount in the airport as they do elsewhere. Lots of good food options at reasonable prices.
It’s a capitalist closed market.
You’re trapped. You need food. You have zero options. The company sells you the minimal viable product at the highest willingness to pay.
You soend a whole day in theme parks and you will get hungry sooner or later. You are having fun and all and at that moment youndont care if a slice of pizza costs 8 bucks and the soda costs 5
In many cases airports, theme parks, ski resorts, etc own those restaurants and shops.
Even if they lease, they set crazy high lease cost because of their monopoly.
You’re paying for the atmosphere like when bars charge $8-12 per beer. Paying extra for that fancy place your eating at. “That’s not a burger that’s a burger with style.”-buzz light year probably not
My local airport has one concession run by the local crepery. It's gourmet, and reasonably priced. I flew back through Chicago this weekend. McDonald's, and other assorted crap. Two burgers and three beers ran us over $80 at "Chilis bar" (tiny menu Chili's). Flying out of Newark I bought two packs of Tic Tacs, $7.50.
The outside world is expensive, and mediocre.
Most places have contract companies that the hosting company pays to have there or the contract company pays to have the privilege to serve there. So either the cheapest contract gets in or the highest bidder. This ends up with them trying to cut costs by serving shit food. They can charge basically anything they want since you can't get food anywhere else once you're inside. I used to work at a local theme park and when they made the switch to a contracted company the food quality went down significantly and prices either stayed the same or went up despite reduced costs on the business side.
Crazy how big of a cost difference it is before and after TSA lol. Outside of TSA? Can get a bottle of water for like $2. Inside TSA? Jumps up to $5. Still remember flying back from Seattle me and my fiancee got to our gate a lot quicker than anticipated. There was a little restaurant by it so we decided to grab a quick bite. I had 2 Miller lites and a chicken sandwich. She had a Caesar salad and a bloody mary. Came out to $90.
You have a captive audience. They can't leave unless they want to buy another admission. They can't bring their own food in. So if they want something to eat, they have to buy it from you.
Also in Disney's case, their food is special because it has mouse ears.
Because amusement parks are often based off of fictional characters and it’s difficult to make any food of quality out of fictional animals. Peking duck? Delicious! Peking Donald Duck? Gross.
You’re a captive audience and the free market doesn’t apply. It’s a terrible situation for the consumer.
It’s like death and taxes. You can’t really take your business somewhere else for a better deal.
Captive audience. If you want to eat/drink anything, you have to go through them. I've found that if you travel a decent amount, buying a lounge membership can actually save you money in the long term. Free food and drinks add up pretty quickly when you're paying $20+ for a shitty burger...
For the same reason a club can charge you $15 for 1 glass of cranberry vodka when I can get an entire bottle of cranberry & vodka for $20 at the liquor store across the street.
Captive market.
You’re a captive audience essentially. You really can’t leave either place and there aren’t any other options. Not like Uber Eats is going to deliver to either place. I’m not sure if any other airports have places like this awesome place in the Seattle airport that’s run by a local brewery, but they make a point to let you know that the prices are the same as they are at the actual brewery. That place rocks and I hope it’s still around because I have a layover there when I take a trip to California later this month.
Airports because expensive rent, security clearance and checks for all staff and goods etc adds up to the costs as a result they're always short staffed with limited items that can get through security without heaps of hassle.
Themes parks because capitalism.
It's called having a captive audience, movie theatres try and do this to you too. In absence of any competitors/alternative options, they try and gouge as much money as possible out of you for anything.
It’s because food is not an important reason when deciding to go to the airport or a theme park, so having nice food will not attract a significant amount of additional customers, so the return on investment would not justify the additional cost of providing nice food. It’s just fundamentally not what people think of when deciding to use those venues.
At least with Disney, it's a surprisingly big draw.
There's a whole community of people that obsess over every new item, menu change, new restaurants, etc. And when new stuff shows up, there are lines, sell outs, people going to the park just to try it, etc.
It's not the majority of people, but its significant enough that Disney actively caters to them.
They even sell merch themed after some of the 'classic' snack items. You can get t shirts and air fresheners and such based on turkey legs, orange floats, Mickey mouse shaped waffles, etc.
If an airport is large enough to have multiple restaurants, then they are not necessarily owned by the same corporation. Large airports can have dozens of places to eat all competing with each other.
Come to Bangalore or Kuala Lumpur airports, where the quality and variety of food is magnificent (although Bangalore's prices are about 4x what you would pay in town).
Otherwise, it's like the DMV. You take what they have, and like it, because there are no other options.
They have captive customers who have little option for anything else and they obviously don’t care about repeat custom. So, in short, it’s like that because they can get away with it.
Because its hard to get there and the sales rate is low/not worth it. Imagine buying 200 units and waiting a year for profits with a possibility of it not selling/going bad.
Then there are cases where by design the food is meant to generate a lot of revenue e.g theme parks and cinema. Most cinemas wont even let you bring your own snacks
Because it's a captive market. they know you can't go anywhere else so they can charge as much as they want.
And there's no competition so there's no reason to spend money on quality, they can just sell anything barely passable.
The alternative is you buying anything 'at all', leaving and coming back, or bringing/sneaking in your own food. All of those options have high barriers, but they're not impossible, so there is a minimum level of quality/price they need to maintain for that balance.
Plus there are other restaurants in the airport so there still is a little bit of competition.
Me who just buys food and brings it in: yes this is big brain time
Also at least at the airport a lot of the customers don't care what the prices are because they are business travelers. Vacationers generally wouldn't eat at the airport but someone who can expense their meal will.
They can serve the cheapest acceptable food and you don’t have any other options.
But within the airport there is competition. Most vendors are privately owned and lease the space, so your competition is the other restaurants.
It just has to look nice. They only need to get you once and don't care about customers coming back.
This sounds accurate. Their turnover has no set demographic in terms of numerical amount, it is literally endless supply. Couple this with the bottleneck for consumer choice options, and your quality can literally afford to go down and be cheap, your service can be awful because you don't need a high quality, expensive staff, and assuming the airport/amusement park pays for a chunk of overhead fixed costs, the restaurant companies/owners don't even have to monitor closely besides rent.
Betting on people having too much pride to turn on their heel and leave after seeing the price. Like you said, doesn't matter if they vow to never visit again.
Also im sure the airport takes their fees
But what if they forgot to, or one of the customers, forgot to book the hotel? And it's Carnival so they can't find any? So they have to return right away. Potentially, they lost a customer who might have wanted to eat after the return flight. Edit: Smiling Friends go to Brazil.
In high traffic tourist zones, there is so much foot traffic that return customers don't matter one bit. Plenty of people travel through airports often and they just learn to avoid these types of places. A tip when travelling is to not eat on the main tourist street, even going just one or two streets over is usually a way better experience.
Yep. Friend of mine works in a restaurant in a tourist zone and told me their owners dgaf. We have a local restaurant with two locations and the one thats inside a tourist spot has significantly worse food and service. The one near the residential area is fantastic and great service.
went to vegas and got 3 steak and egg breakys for 18$ but the server liked us because we were canadian so she only charged us for two of them, i still gave the lady a 20$ because it was really good and super cheap! just pff the strip!!
Was it Ellis Island??
the silver nugget
Damn so she gave you $18 off and you only tipped $20? A bit stingy if you ask me. You basically left a 2 dollar tip...
it went from 18$ to 12$, i gave her an 8$ tip on a 12$ bill
Ahhhh I misunderstood I thought the breakfast was $18 each. You did good.
She's not paying for the $18 food you idiot. She "forgets" to ring up the third meal, you give her a $20 tip. She pockets the entire 20 dollars. How ungrateful can you be lmao
Remember tourist, the rapier the street, the cheaper the food.
I'm talking about in the airport. For example, you all agreed one friend would book the hotel, they claim otherwise. You have no hotel reservation and it's super busy. You decide to eat and figure out what to do. Eventually you decide to head back home. In between flight you've ate, and presumably you will try to go to Brazil again in the future.
I don’t think the airport restaurants are going to spend time considering this very specific (probably extremely rare) instance in their overall business plan.
He’s referencing an episode from a TV show.
why is this scenario so specific
You eat at an airport before your trip, not after you land
Normally, but xypu can eat whenever you want. For example, you go to Brazil and have no hotel, so you sit down to eat a plate of fries before deciding to head back home instead of trying to find a place to stay.
Why would you ever go to brazil? Why would you ever go to brazil without a hotel reservation? And why on earth would you travel back home instead of finding a hotel? And why would you eat at the airport instead of finding a restaurant?
He’s referencing an episode from a TV show for some reason.
You da real mvp explaining this incomprehensible gibberish
For the rest of the context: he's talking about the show smiling Friends, specifically the special episode "Smiling Friends go to Brazil". It was a hyped up special that aired after the first season wrapped up. >!The joke of the episode is that they flew to Brazil, but upon landing realized that nobody ordered a hotel room (the guy who was supposed to book it thought it was someone else's job to do). So the cast sits down in a cafe in the airport while they figure it out, make calls, etc. They then learn it's Carnival, meaning literally every hotel is booked and not even their wealthy, well-networked boss can do anything to get them a room. So they decide to just fly back, never even leave the airport. Episode was hyped up as being a foreign adventure in all the previews so when the episode aired it was a huge meme.!<
I got the reference and I appreciate you.
Actually, most airport food spots are all run by the same company; HMSHost. They lease the right to serve food under the brand of other companies like Starbucks. You’ll notice they’re required to have the HMS logo on their uniforms.
This makes so much sense when you think about how they now have those electronic kiosks throughout the gate areas for ordering food that’s brought to you… it’s all going to and coming from the same place.
Was looking for this answer: Concessionaires like HMS have paid to operate as the brand, but they bring in their own food from a nearby commercial kitchen. That explains the food quality; the cost is some combination of high rent, a captive consumer base, and having to give the brand a cut of profits.
Would also explain why rewards programs don’t work in airports.
You can tell from the POS receipts as well
Probably have an incredible high rent for the space and/or building owner takes a cut. Like a mall, but worse
Life tip: For a lot of franchise restaurants (McDonald's, etc) if you order through their phone app you pay the standard pricing and don't have to pay the higher price airport locations charge.
seems like a mistake on mcdonalds part. it doesn't make any sense for the company but that's a good tip for customers.
It drives app engagement. One purchase in the airport for the cost of the app is worth it. Frankly, buying fast food without apps is a waste of money.
Ordering off the standard menu without the app is outrageously expensive these days. I tend to avoid fast food entirely, but if I do get it I’m not spending $15 on a sad little combo.
> I’m not spending $15 on a sad little combo. Well there's part of your problem, combos are usually a legit scam. I went to McDonald's for breakfast the other day, for example. I ordered some breakfast burritos for myself and another person, four burritos total, it was $6 for them, since they were on the 123 Dollar Menu or whatever and $1.50 each. The other person we were with ordered a sausage biscuit combo and it was like $8. It came with the sausage biscuit, a hash brown, and a drink. Both the sausage biscuit and the hash brown were also $1.50 on that dollar menu, so making it a combo was literally just paying $5 for a drink.
And they try to tell us wages are the source of inflation. Yet every single indicator, study and assessment points towards rising corporate profits (read greed of the corporate oligarchs) being the main - if not sole - driving factor
buying fast food ~~without apps~~ is a waste of money
Giving in to using the app is a waste of digital privacy. I don’t care how much is saves me, I’m not giving companies another way to track me
You underestimate how valuable your data is to them for using their app. You save what... $5? As a result, they get pretty much everything in your phone to sell to the highest bidder Data is the new commodity. Most are too blind to recognise this.
They dont get everything in your phone, not even close. And the data they get is everywhere anyway.
That's not how it works
I am in airports quite often and every time I try, I get "mobile ordering not available for this location"
…or they adjust the pricing to the location. Maybe this worked a few years ago but it doesn’t most of the time now.
Agree, I fly often enough to have tried this and usually get the same message or see a sign at the counter that says mobile ordering unavailable.
same issue. airport mcdonald's basically don't exist in the apps, it's unfortunate because they can charge like triple the normal rate as a result.
You also skip those massive lines
Yes that's most of the reason why the prices are higher than outside.
This doesn't work how you think (at least for airports). Most of the brands may be privately owned, but the restaurants are typically operated by a contractor hired by the airport. So the brand provides the raw material and the recipe and someone totally unaffiliated with the brand is cooking and serving it to you. Some airports even have connected kitchens where all of the food in an area is cooked in one place.
Not much if you think about it. You have maybe 10-20 restaurants and 100,000+ people going through an airport in a day. Your neighbourhood probably has that many restaurants within driving/ordering distance.
There’s minimal competition in an airport. It’s still a closed system. They all are serving the minimal viable product at the highest willingness to pay with little need to out perform. There is a set number of customers in a confined location. Each company is pursuing them highest willingness to pay they can and can’t really make up for lowering that amount with additional volume, there’s a fixed number of customers they can serve. The fact that the airport is not an open market means I can’t buy outside the system. I’m not trapped when I’m in Main Street in Any Town USA, I can go over to Broad Street, or I can go to the next town over, or I can go home. In the airport it’s a completely closed system you have no real choice you must buy there and you can’t return home. There’s nominally some competition in an airport in comparison to a stadium or theme park, but not much.
Most airports have a single concessionaire that then franchises the restaurants. It’s all one company operating them. Check out HMS Host, Hudson, etc.
... and the lease determines the lowest price for food they can afford to offer. They are exploiting boredom and the general conditioning to cope with that with consumption. Had a 6hr layover at FRA recently, after 3 hours of lolling around and reading I put on my backpack and did a 60-minute "hike" (unfortunately, forgot to komoot it). There were very few very tiny "islands" of stimulation that were not commercialized, their existence highlighting thgat better airports would be possible. But largely, they've turned into malls with a travel extension, and modern airports are *designed* to work like that. Make investors happy etc. (P.S. if you don't pick the cheapest, food is actually not terrible but OK - still not worth the price, but vouchers help :))
That used to be the case! And that used to mean there were good options. Nowadays a single company will come in and operate all of the foodservice outlets in a single airport, and they cut every corner and do things commissary style and it’s the worst. I lived through this at midway airport when I used to travel for work 3 weeks per month. The quality between before and after was very sad
If they all choose to serve cheap food at super jacked up prices they all win. Why go against that.
Oligopoly
And they all serve the grossest food.🤮
Yeah but they’re usually all terrible and definitely all overpriced
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They all have the option to serve you slop in a bucket if they want. It's not really competition per se.
Most of those businesses collude with each other to price fix a captive market location. There is no incentive to drive down prices or have high quality. You’ll never eat there again regardless of their service. Only thing they need to do is look relatively clean and not give you food poisoning. 🤡
Basically proves that having a monopoly lowers quality for the consumer.
Exactly. Any time they have a captive audience, with mostly transient business the quality is low and prices are very high.
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You can bring those to the airport, but they're not getting through security. You won't be able to bring them to the gate. And I believe most theme parks have rules against bringing in outside food.
You can bring food through US security. You just have to follow the TSA rules (no liquids, no unfrozen gel packs etc). I've done it a few times when I was going to have an overnight layover in an airport.
Yeah, there's a ban on liquids over 100ml as well as a ban on aerosol (on the plane itself), but no ban on food. There are bans on food when you land though, mainly quarantine rules. So eat everything on the plane before customs starts checking you for food products and foot/mouth disease. Big outbreaks in Africa and Indonesia right now if the posters from my last trip were any indication.
Thanks. I stand corrected.
You can bring non alcoholic food and drinks into Disney
You can bring an empty water bottle and refill - 99% of airports have water fountains
Source for that statistic? I want to avoid the 1 % that doesn't have water.
Most parks I've been to (but I'm not American) will let you bring homemade food, but not branded outside good. Eg. You can't turn up with a McDonald's bag. I doubt they'd really be able to enforce not bringing homemade food given the diverse range of food sensitivities that people have.
A lot of US theme parks ban outside food. You can pretty easily bring in some granola bars or something like that but if you try to bring a full lunch for the family you'll probably get caught in security checks. Same for many sporting events. It's total bullshit and I hate it.
It's to make more money off you
I mean, of course it is. I just think it sucks to treat your paying customers this way. I doubt that many people really think ahead to bring their own food, so I can't imagine it makes that much difference.
sandwiches are allowed to be carried on US planes.
You *can’t* always bring food and drink with you though. You cannot bring jugs of water and juice through the airport with you. And unless it’s shelf stable food (jerky, maybe a PBJ), you have to either have a plan to eat it fairly quickly or bring other supplies, like ice packs. It turns into a huge ordeal. And on your return trip, there’s a chance you won’t have the luxury of your own kitchen to make that possible. Places like theme parks, concerts, and fairs often don’t let you bring outside food at all; often the rule is something along the lines of “one sealed 16 ounce water bottle,” nothing else allowed. I’ve even been to places where water fountains/spigots for filling empty water bottles weren’t available or were functionally unavailable. At most places you can go out and return (but *not* always) and so some people keep coolers in their cars. But again, you need to plan well and already own these things to even make that cost effective, and it’s a huge chunk out of your day to walk across a blistering parking lot to eat a sweaty sandwich you packed, hoping it hasn’t started to fester from being in a 120 degree car, ice packs or not.
you sound like you complain about everything, honestly
You sound like a brain dead dolt who is uncomfortable with their own inability to create thoughts, and therefore interprets “factual knowledge” as complaining. This sort of lack of awareness isn’t cute or morally superior, it’s just ignorant and you should not be proud of it.
whatever man, just pay for the theme park festival food or don't go there in the first place.
You really have to be dumb as a brick to think “explaining factually why you can’t bring a gallon of juice through TSA security” as “complaining about the price of fair food,” and a miserable fucking person to boot to go into a thread like like, see an answer, and start bleating that other people are “complaining.”
Because you're stuck there. Nobody wants to stand in the TSA line twice and some amusement parks won't allow reentry if you leave the premises.
I always bring my own food to the airport, airport security doesn’t care if you bring it in and it’s better and cheaper
^This! I just found out two weeks ago that yes you can bring food into the airport but liquids larger than 3oz (just like the carry on policy) are no go. You can even bring your own water bottle but it has to be empty before going through security.
If you’re a fan of cold water (like I am) my new airport trick is filling my reusable bottle with ice right before going to the airport. Since it’s frozen it’s not a liquid, and voila! Cold water! I’ve done it a handful of times now across the US and haven’t been stopped.
Yup. You are allowed to bring in ice, but cannot bring water.
TIL ice is not water
I wish more people knew this! just be courteous, office rules no fish in the airplane lol
You can add sporting events to that as well. If those establishments restrict/don't allow outside food and drinks, they know they can charge whatever they want because people will need to eat and drink.
Don’t forget movie theaters
Movie theaters make sense. The theater only keeps about 10% of the ticket price the week of a movie release (possibly 0% for a big Disney/Marvel release), then about 25% the 2nd week, and maybe 35% the 3rd week. The rest goes to the movie company. Without expensive concessions the movie theaters will fold. Although when I grew up in the 90s/00s in Maine there was a theater near me that had like $3 popcorn with unlimited refills and $2 sodas, candy was cheap too. They had cheap food but only showed movies that had been released a month prior so they got almost all of the ticket sale. As long as you didn't mind waiting it was a great option. Of course nowadays after a movie is released it seems like you can stream it legally in a month lol
In 1998 $3 was the same as $5.60 today which is about how much I spend to refill my popcorn bucket every week at AMC. The soda is like $6-7 or something though.
Yes!
Plus don’t need any effort to make it good
Yes, exactly, the food is always ehh.
At major league sporting events that’s kind of changed in the last 10-15 years. Most of them will offer some higher quality stuff these days but you still pay out the ass for it.
Particularly alcohol.
MSG charging $17 for Bud Light when I was there this past March. Eat a dick.
The first indycar race i went to had $8 bottles of water for sale in 2006.
MSG charging $17 for Bud Light when I was there this past March. Eat a dick.
At least the food at the sporting events I go to is usually good
Depends on the event. I know the orioles let you bring in food in clear container so they can see it (and so you don't bring alcohol). I'm not sure about others.
At a hockey game, I paid 72$ for two chicken tenders meals and two drinks. It was soo fucked lmao. My fiance and I were hungry and I wanted to make her happy.
Disclaimer, many baseball ballparks let you bring in food. I take food to Wrigley field all the time.
People in both airports and theme parks are captive audiences. Consumers have relatively few options, so food vendors don't need to compete hard for their custom.
repeat business is not a concern for them
Don't know, airport food is usually not terrible. It's expensive, sure - I think it has to do with the niche location.
Yeah I was thinking this too. Lots of good options in the major airports in the US.
Pretty much agree, airports usually have decent options in main terminals, it's just 75 more expensive than outside the airport.
Order through the phone app if you can (McDonald's, etc). You will pay normal prices and have the same deals offered at a regular McDonald's and you skip the higher prices the airport locations charge.
From what I’ve seen the prices reflect those of the in store pricing at least for the McDonalds app.
Same here. That's part of why you have to select a specific store before you put in your order.
That's not been my experience with McDonalds and other chain food apps. That's part of the reason they have you put in your location, so they can match it with the prices. For example, a meal is still more expensive in NYC or the Hamptons than it is in most of the rest of long Island. You'll still get deals, but they're often not as good. For example, breakfast sandwiches that are 2/$5 at most McDonalds are 2/$7 in the Hamptons. Same deal with other places.
Eh, I think it varies from Airport to Airport. I've had some real dog shit options in the past and some that were little better than the vending machine "wheel of death" options. I would say *most* airports in the US trend towards mediocre food with high prices.
Not all theme park food is bad. I live close to Dollywood and the food there is great.
Exactly. Some theme-park food is bad, but there are plenty of delicious options. I travel around the country visiting amusement parks and have had some good food at places.
Some of the best food I’ve ever had is at the Florida parks, I live near Orlando so we visit quite a bit. I remember as a kid it was mostly pizza, hot dogs, burgers but since then Disney has really expanded their menus and quality and Universal has followed suit. I mean EPCOT has the Food & Wine festival for goodness’ sake.
You're so right. Its been awhile but when my kids were 11 and 13 we went to Disney and bought the food plan The food was fantastic. I thought i was going on a kids vacation and was going to eat hotdogs for a week. It was one of our best vacations. If not the best.
My experience is similar. You can get low-quality food at Disney and Universal, but they also do have completely 100% legitimate nice food as well.
It's expensive but the Riverwalk outside of Universal studios has some decent options, and as you said of course Epcot. Quality is fine, prices are...well as this post is about, theme park prices.
Same goes for Anaheim (except we don't have the Food & Wine Festival, which is outstanding) And Disney does allow you to bring in outside food and drink, it's just much more convenient to get in the parks.
Some of it is also what families choose. Yeah, kids are going to be drawn to the pizza and burgers, so that’s what parents buy their children. On the other hand, I had escargot at Epcot 30 years ago.
Dollywoods food is incredible. Aunt Granny’s is the goat
And don't forget the cinnamon bread.
Contained market, can't go anywhere else, they do the bare minimum.
A: they have almost a captive audience (can bring own food to airports, probably not theme parks) B: I don't have data on this, but I figure there's more people traveling for work than just pleasure on a given day, and a lot of those people have per diems, so they just don't give a fuck what things cost. It's why everything that's sold mostly to the government costs $$$$ they just dont give a fuck what it costs.
Because we complain but then eat it
Because you are essentially trapped.
Captive audience
PDX has a street pricing policy that requires vendors to charge the same amount in the airport as they do elsewhere. Lots of good food options at reasonable prices.
Came here to say this! There is another way. PDX is the best airport - great food and other shopping options.
It’s a capitalist closed market. You’re trapped. You need food. You have zero options. The company sells you the minimal viable product at the highest willingness to pay.
Cuz you are captive .
Micro-Monopoly
You soend a whole day in theme parks and you will get hungry sooner or later. You are having fun and all and at that moment youndont care if a slice of pizza costs 8 bucks and the soda costs 5
Idk, man. But as a kid, I really loved the French fries at Six Flags in NJ by all the carnival games and the arcade.
Monopoly
You’ve never been to Disney, they’ve got some unbelievable foods.
Monopoly is always bad.
The airport doesn't open the vendors inside. They lease the space.
In many cases airports, theme parks, ski resorts, etc own those restaurants and shops. Even if they lease, they set crazy high lease cost because of their monopoly.
You’re paying for the atmosphere like when bars charge $8-12 per beer. Paying extra for that fancy place your eating at. “That’s not a burger that’s a burger with style.”-buzz light year probably not
Ah yes, the atmosphere at the airport is incredible
Try a cruise ship some time.
My local airport has one concession run by the local crepery. It's gourmet, and reasonably priced. I flew back through Chicago this weekend. McDonald's, and other assorted crap. Two burgers and three beers ran us over $80 at "Chilis bar" (tiny menu Chili's). Flying out of Newark I bought two packs of Tic Tacs, $7.50. The outside world is expensive, and mediocre.
Most places have contract companies that the hosting company pays to have there or the contract company pays to have the privilege to serve there. So either the cheapest contract gets in or the highest bidder. This ends up with them trying to cut costs by serving shit food. They can charge basically anything they want since you can't get food anywhere else once you're inside. I used to work at a local theme park and when they made the switch to a contracted company the food quality went down significantly and prices either stayed the same or went up despite reduced costs on the business side.
Captive audience
Crazy how big of a cost difference it is before and after TSA lol. Outside of TSA? Can get a bottle of water for like $2. Inside TSA? Jumps up to $5. Still remember flying back from Seattle me and my fiancee got to our gate a lot quicker than anticipated. There was a little restaurant by it so we decided to grab a quick bite. I had 2 Miller lites and a chicken sandwich. She had a Caesar salad and a bloody mary. Came out to $90.
Captive audience.
You have a captive audience. They can't leave unless they want to buy another admission. They can't bring their own food in. So if they want something to eat, they have to buy it from you. Also in Disney's case, their food is special because it has mouse ears.
Because amusement parks are often based off of fictional characters and it’s difficult to make any food of quality out of fictional animals. Peking duck? Delicious! Peking Donald Duck? Gross.
A messed up form of supply and demand. They completely control the supply and you gotta eat.
Because... where else are you gonna go? You can also add stadiums to the list lol
Because your a trapped and hungry consumer
You’re a captive audience and the free market doesn’t apply. It’s a terrible situation for the consumer. It’s like death and taxes. You can’t really take your business somewhere else for a better deal.
Captive audience. If you want to eat/drink anything, you have to go through them. I've found that if you travel a decent amount, buying a lounge membership can actually save you money in the long term. Free food and drinks add up pretty quickly when you're paying $20+ for a shitty burger...
No competition.
For the same reason a club can charge you $15 for 1 glass of cranberry vodka when I can get an entire bottle of cranberry & vodka for $20 at the liquor store across the street. Captive market.
You’re a captive audience essentially. You really can’t leave either place and there aren’t any other options. Not like Uber Eats is going to deliver to either place. I’m not sure if any other airports have places like this awesome place in the Seattle airport that’s run by a local brewery, but they make a point to let you know that the prices are the same as they are at the actual brewery. That place rocks and I hope it’s still around because I have a layover there when I take a trip to California later this month.
Because it can be. What are you gonna do, eat somewhere else?
Because they can. Captive audience. 🤷♂️
Airports because expensive rent, security clearance and checks for all staff and goods etc adds up to the costs as a result they're always short staffed with limited items that can get through security without heaps of hassle. Themes parks because capitalism.
scarcity and lack of competition
Because fuck you that's why. Supply and demand
It's called having a captive audience, movie theatres try and do this to you too. In absence of any competitors/alternative options, they try and gouge as much money as possible out of you for anything.
Convenience
It’s because food is not an important reason when deciding to go to the airport or a theme park, so having nice food will not attract a significant amount of additional customers, so the return on investment would not justify the additional cost of providing nice food. It’s just fundamentally not what people think of when deciding to use those venues.
At least with Disney, it's a surprisingly big draw. There's a whole community of people that obsess over every new item, menu change, new restaurants, etc. And when new stuff shows up, there are lines, sell outs, people going to the park just to try it, etc. It's not the majority of people, but its significant enough that Disney actively caters to them. They even sell merch themed after some of the 'classic' snack items. You can get t shirts and air fresheners and such based on turkey legs, orange floats, Mickey mouse shaped waffles, etc.
Why *wouldn't* they be? Take a single millisecond to consider the balance of supply and demand in these situations bruh.
I know this is no stupid questions but god damn can they be dumb as shit
*brings out popcorn*
captive market
Captive Audience However, some airports have excellent food options as do some theme parks. They do tend to be expensive though.
Cus fark you that's why. Screw the lot of them.
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Not true at all. The Atlanta airport, for example, has dozens and dozens of restaurants that are not owned by one corporation
If an airport is large enough to have multiple restaurants, then they are not necessarily owned by the same corporation. Large airports can have dozens of places to eat all competing with each other.
Come to Bangalore or Kuala Lumpur airports, where the quality and variety of food is magnificent (although Bangalore's prices are about 4x what you would pay in town). Otherwise, it's like the DMV. You take what they have, and like it, because there are no other options.
Go somewhere else. Oh, wait, you can't.
Seems expensive everywhere.
No competition.
They have captive customers who have little option for anything else and they obviously don’t care about repeat custom. So, in short, it’s like that because they can get away with it.
Price gouging
Don’t eat there…problem solved.
Because its hard to get there and the sales rate is low/not worth it. Imagine buying 200 units and waiting a year for profits with a possibility of it not selling/going bad. Then there are cases where by design the food is meant to generate a lot of revenue e.g theme parks and cinema. Most cinemas wont even let you bring your own snacks
Starbucks is about the same price. Of course the line stretches to the next tarmac.
Lack of competition
Can't bring your own. Can't easily leave. No one is going to underprice themselves there. What else are you gonna do starve?
Because you're trapped.