High-income Americans rarely mix with poorer people. Restaurants like Applebee's and Olive Garden are the exception

People in here are missing the point. Yeah, Applebees, Olive Garden, IHOP, etc. aren't "classy", they're cheap chain sit-down restaurants. They appeal to a wide audience, cause they are clean, the food is fine, they serve a variety of drinks, and you can go there semi-regularly as long as you have some disposable income.
Sure, you're not going to see multi-millionaires who grew up rich going there, those people go to the "fancy" chains, like Ruth's Chris Steak House. But you'd probably see a 6 figure tech job family sitting in a both next to a plumber family sitting next to a doctor family. Which is something you don't really see at most other places.
- They're anything but cheap
- Six figure tech job here. I no longer feel like I can afford Applebee's, idk about olive garden because the food is gross. Certainly can't afford drinks and dinner.
  
  All you can eat zupa toscana. It's the only reason to go to olive garden. The salad is fine also I guess. Hard to fuck up lettuce and Italian dressing. That said I probably go less than once a year.
  Applebee's, on the other hand, I don't think I've been to one in fifteen years.
  I don't really like eating out that much any more unless it's for something I can't do at home like sushi or hibachi or a slow roasted brisket. Slop on a plate with sauce or a medium rare ribeye are things I can easily make at home for half the price.
- It's not really the money, these places just seem like a terrible waste of And if you're getting the lower calorie healthier option on these menus the food is just totally depressing. Always something like "here's a piece of lemon, some leaves, and a skinless chicken breast." I'm not paying someone to prepare that for me.
  
  Olive Garden is freaking disgusting to me. It's normal for things like soups to be made ahead of time and kept warm, their food tastes extremely tortured, though. event the pasta is far more 'meh' than it should be.
  The only thing going for Olive Garden is the giant olives in the salad. Which promptly find their way onto my (or the nephew's) fingertips for a little childish fun. (Unfortunately, the rest of the family actually likes OG. I don't know why.)
- Dude, do you know how much a plumber makes?
  
  I have a nephew that just started classes at a vocational school. He said plumbers and electricians average the highest salaries of all the major trades.
  Having just replaced a 30 year old oil heating system with a new high efficiency gas one I can say without a doubt that plumbers definitely make good money.
- Sounds like you are describing a Diner.

Lmfao Applebee's isn't classy at all, it's like a step above Denny's. Nobody with money is like 'you know what I want tonight? some shitty microwaved food in a 90s setting where the service is meh and the cost is 3x what it's actually worth'. People who think it's high-class, are not actually high-income. Maybe to the social media influences, not people with real jobs.
Or has the joint turned itself around massively in the last decade?
- I don't even consider Applebee's to be a restaurant.
  
  It's my neighborhood bar and grill
- People who think it’s high-class, are not actually high-income.
  Trump likes his steak well done with ketchup and his bathrooms gold plated.
  Zuckerberg pays hundreds for crappy grey t-shirts.
  The richest man in the world is a twat.
  Wealth, class, and discernment are not synonymous.
  Cunts are still running the world.
  
  Trump likes his steak well done with ketchup and his bathrooms gold plated.
  because he's mentally and literally still in diapers. the man is a toddler.
- Maybe they mean high income in comparison to the world? Like the top 10% of wage earners globally starts at just above $100,000 and that isn't caviar and cristal money.
  
  I would think it's exclusive to the US since these are both US restaurants.
- Bullshit you can get pancakes at Denny's. Applebee's is a step above 711 since someone else microwaves the tv dinner for you.
- My wife and I are high income but we used to be very poor. To this day Chili's is a "go to" date night joint.
- I think people only go to Applebee's for the cheap drinks.
- The hundred millionaire CEO of the corporation I work goes to Applebee's. Yes really. My boss swears when they went once the guy took out a coupon.
  
  LOL, holy shit
- You don't go to Applebee's because you want great food or a classy atmosphere. You go there because you know what to expect, no surprises.
  You know the food will be, at least, OK. You go there because the service will be, at least, OK. You already know the prices, at least roughly.
  It's a safe place to take a first date or take the family kinda place. Nothing will be wildly out of anyone's expectations, plenty of choices for everyone. We all know what we're walking into. Bland but "safe".
  Personally? I'd rather take a bet on a rotten-assed, hole-in-the-wall dive where no one speaks English and the salsa is actually hot. But that's just me.
- Applebees is for boomers. Your 60 year olds are eating there because they want to. Anyone under 40 doesn’t actually want to be there.
  
  originally, Applebees was for millennial college and high school students going out to for a place to get cheap apetizers and hang out together.
  then the boomers started invading.

I wonder if this article is just an ad for those restaurants. "Eat here to mix with the elites!"
- "Eat here to mix with the serfs!"
  Serf and turf?
  
  More like "serf & toff". 🤌🏼
- Slowly turning into a Life in Hell strip
  
  This is incredible. I completely forgot about Groening's comic strip days. All I used to hear about was the original Simpsons stuff.

Call it an anecdote but I have never seen a single person at Applebee's who looked like they earned more than $30,000/yr
- I haven't been to an Applebee's since like 2010, but I'm gonna assume going out to eat at Applebee's has also gotten more expensive to the point where your comment is probably less valid than it was in like 2010.
  Like, I don't think someone earning 30k/yr is able to budget in a night out at Applebee's rn.
  
  You are correct. It's better to just find a local place to eat, which will have better food at basically the same price. Just like fast food out pricing it's worth, these places all feel very weird now that they can't compete with the pricing they were originally made for.
  
  I feel like I’m about to reveal a ton of disconnect but, how cheap would it need to be to be affordable on a 30k salary? I’m not trying to be an ass, I genuinely don’t know.
  I checked the menu of an Applebee’s near me. You can get two meals for less than $36, including tip. This is at a very high cost of living area (South Bay Area). That’s like $18 if you’re splitting it. I don’t go to Applebee’s a lot, is that actually much more than it used to be or unaffordable in today’s 30k?
- How would you know?
  Not everyone who's rich, dresses like Richie Rich. Plenty dress down, dress frugally or simply don't give a fuck about impressing diners in a chain restaurant. Hell, I used to work for a bank, and some of our richest clients looked borderline homeless.
  I mean, you can dress like Zuckerberg for 50 bucks. Sure, his boring ass t-shirts actually costs a few hundred, but you wouldn't be able to tell unless you took a really close look. Old money also loves going under the radar.
  
  LOL, the beach bums around here are often multi-millionaires with nothing better to do than get fucked up on the beach. Don't judge people around here based on appearance!
  
  Old money doesn't drive rusty Saturn and Pontiac sedans with mismatched body panels though.
- That's because we dress for the restaurant.
  
  Seriously. Nobody is putting on even a dress shirt to go to Applebees.

so both wealthy and poor people have equally bad palates, gotcha
- "That's what rich people eat; the garbage parts of food."
  "Well I had garbage yesterday and it didn't cost $300!"

All these places are just fancy fast food. Half of the menu I'd frozen to fat fryer. But hey if your having fun, that's what counts.
- Maybe 20+ years ago. I view current Applebee's as just plain shit and Olive Garden as a faux fancy restaurant that probably has a giant bank of microwaves in the kitchen to prepare your prepackaged frozen meals.
  
  Olive Garden serves nothing but microwavable meals you can get at the grocery store.
- Tfw I like olive garden. I only ever get the soup, salad, and bread sticks tho.
  
  Olive garden is different. When you're there, you're family.

- Risk reduction. Safe choice.
  The food will be ok, there's a relatively small risk of food poisoning, or having an especially shit meal. You know what you're getting.
  Same business model as chain hotels and blockbusters starring A-listers with name recognition. Customers know it will be just ok, but that's enough.
  
  This is exactly why I go to McDonald's when I'm anywhere away from home. It's almost always the same, and their corporate side is extremely serious about consistency and quality.
  
  Exactly. Finding good restaurants takes time, too. We had a lot less (none) of that available after we had a kid. So low risk and sticking to what you know makes sense. As she got older we have been able to experiment some.
- My grandmother always insisted on going to somewhere like Olive Garden or Applebees when I'd go have my regular visits with her. Never understood it, but it made her happy and she didn't like trying new stuff, so not a big deal. I feel like Boomers have got to be the only people left keeping these places afloat. I don't know a single person blow 50 who eats there.
  
  There's a large swath of people who never try anything new. They'd visit somewhere 3000 miles away and eat at somewhere familiar like McDonald's/Subway etc.
- Some of them are much better, some are just as bad. Too many local resteraunts around me have the same Sysco derived menu items. The same coconut shrimp cooked the same way in them all... Sure it is a different name out front and it isn't a franchise but it may as well be.

Olive Garden hits different. Sure I can go to some classy authentic Italian restaurant and I do, but sometimes you get a craving that only Olive Garden salad, breadsticks, and shitty pasta can satisfy.
- Give me breadsticks and a giant bowl of alfredo sauce and I'm set.

We had to shut down the applebees because no one could afford to eat there in my town

I'm curious if the content was switched after comments were made? Like it's just some research that uses mobile data to show likely interactions, but most comments are rebutting things that were never said and doesn't seem to be in the PDF, ie, "these places aren't classy."
- People here love shitting on anything people like.
  Helps them feel cool
  
  here?

Fascinating that the article runs down a whole host of communal gathering spots and completely, utterly, fails to mention houses of worship.
"Other businesses, like pharmacies, grocery stores, and gyms, or public institutions, like parks, schools, and libraries, are not as diverse"
Where do the different faiths rank compared to restaurants? Are they all the same or do Pentacostals rank lower than, say Catholics?
Maybe the authors of the study went out of their way to ignore the religious angle.
- Rich people don't go to church, that's for the poors
- That's because churches are more segregational than communal.
- I don't know if you noticed that people of differing religions don't meet up in each other's houses of worship. And often times some very petty differences have hugely violent ramifications.
  Perhaps religions and its properties are a vehicle of segregation not commingling.
  
  No, but the question is people of varying income levels meeting up in the same space.
  So how does the income disparity in a Catholic church measure up to a Mormon one? Or a Synagog to a Mosque? Would be interesting to find out.

When you're here, you're a lesser form of family. Don't look at me.

This makes me think of a thing I saw on YouTube. These guys review Olive garden commercials https://youtu.be/MASjtPaOdgg?si=6_4XrYNRpfifr5UO

Has the quality gone down at Applebee's and Olive Garden? I haven't been to either recently but I recall them being consistently ok, certainly better than "shitty microwaved food", as one commenter put it. I'm sensing some big "I think it's super cool to look down on things" energy in this thread.
- both trash honestly it is pretty microwave heavy
  
  The last time I went to Olive Garden my raviolis were clearly microwaved as the food was hot but the shells were rock hard without looking overcooked in any way. It's all garbage corporate food with a facade of being 'fancy' because they have some Italian decor on the walls.
- Olive Garden is still okay, but Applebee's has definitely declined drastically.
  
  That's frightening, it was garbage food the last time I went to one, about 20 years ago.
- Honestly, it's just the cool thing to meme on on the Internet. Like saying the ice cream machine at McDonald's is always down.
  They aren't the greatest, but they're ok.
  
  I'm sure I will curse myself by saying this, but I have never encountered a broken McDonald's ice cream machine.
  However, I have encountered an El Pollo Loco that was out of chicken.