America’s New “Value Menu” Economy Should Worry You

Authored by Peter Reagan,

The hottest restaurant items of 2025 aren’t gourmet burgers – they’re value meals. When eating out turns into a budgeting exercise, it reveals something deeper about inflation, the rising cost of living and the quiet erosion of our quality of life…

Restaurants have been a constant of human life for centuries, from roadside taverns serving weary travelers to dining rooms built to impress the wealthy.

Every city, town, and village has one. Even places too small for a post office usually have somewhere to eat.

Today, restaurants are so ubiquitous that many towns have at least one drive-through, letting people grab a meal without leaving their car and eat it on the way back to work.

Because the industry is everywhere (and fiercely competitive), restaurants are always searching for the next angle to pull people through the door and persuade them to spend.

That’s why chains closely track which menu items sell best.

What’s surprising isn’t that they do this. No, it’s what those top-selling items are in 2025.

The hot new trend: Reading menus from right to left

Often, what’s “hot” especially in fancy restaurants is exotic, disgusting, gross or just plain expensive. I once watched an episode of Bizarre Foods where Andrew Zimmern ate a cobra heart. I’ve seen restaurants in LA that serve desserts covered in gold foil (I didn’t order one).

Well, it seems that, at least for now, those days are behind us. According to Amelia Lucas with CNBC, the hottest menu items for 2025 are “value” items. That’s right, budget foods, the ones that cost less or give more calories for your buck, those were the hottest items year-round.

This trend may explain why McDonald’s no longer carries a gourmet burger (which I thought was surprisingly good). Well, it wasn’t a budget product, so it had to go.

And McDonald’s isn’t the only chain cutting down to the bare budget basics. Not by a long shot.

And I bet you can guess why restaurant chains are focusing on the low end of their pricing spectrum. Lucas tells us that “diners, particularly those who make less than $40,000 a year, have been eating out less frequently and spending less money when they do.”

In fact, according to Lauren Clifford at Lending Tree, 85% of Americans surveyed said that they have changed “their dining out habits.” Nearly three out of five said they’re eating out less often.

They just can’t afford it. And when they do eat out, they order off the value menu.

One way of describing it that I found interesting: They read restaurant menus from right to left, checking the price to see if they can afford something before even checking to see if they actually want to eat it. If you’ve ever tried to impress someone by taking them to a restaurant you couldn’t afford, then you’ve probably done this yourself… I know I have. But now people are doing this all the time.

Eating out, which used to be an affordable reward at the end of a long work week, a small luxury that most Americans could enjoy? No longer. Most families can’t afford the temporary respite from cooking dinner for the family and cleaning up the kitchen afterwards.

Now, it’s an exercise in budgeting to even see if they can afford to eat at that restaurant.

Life on the value side

It probably comes as no surprise that more and more people are choosing to eat at home more often than eating out. Sure, Dave Ramsey may be proud of them for doing that, but that’s little consolation when it’s not a choice but a necessity.

The change in how Americans are eating doesn’t stop at the move to focusing on value menu items and eating out less. It is also affecting how people are eating at home. Clifford notes that nearly nine out of ten Americans surveyed “are changing the way they shop to fight inflated grocery bills.” And over 60% of those surveyed said they were stressed about the possibility of not being able to buy enough groceries within the month before the survey.

That’s just appalling. How many mothers and fathers does that include who are scared that they won’t be able to feed junior and their precious little girl? Worse still, earlier this month I read that a shocking 60% of families report skipping meals to save money. Nearly half have delayed payments on such essential expenses as utilities and rent.

Back in November, a survey found that 1 in 5 Americans said they’d taken out a loan to pay bills or rent. (And almost half said they weren’t sure they could pay it back.)

People working hard now are having difficulty making ends meet, and people who’ve worked hard their entire lives are scared that they may have to just stop eating until their next check comes in.

I’m not telling you all this so we can just wring our hands about how much these people are suffering. Or so we can tut-tut and shake our heads and judge them for failing financially.

This trend is important for two reasons.

• First, the big-picture, macroeconomic reason: Consumer spending makes up 2/3 of total GDP. When families cut back spending, it’s bad news for the economy. Often a sign of imminent recession.

• Second, the small-picture, microeconomic reason: When we see bad things happen to others, it’s natural to ask how we can avoid such fates. So what can we do?

Failing to plan is planning to fail

It’s a scary situation to find yourself in if you have children and grandchildren to feed, especially if you’re retired, depending on a fixed income. Finding yourself in a situation in which you struggle to make the most basic purchases to maintain your standard of living (not even luxury) isn’t just stressful. It’s humiliating.

Most families aren’t in that situation because they weren’t willing to work hard. They aren’t in this position because they avoided responsibility, or made bad decisions. Most of them followed a conventional path. They just never realized how much inflation could quietly erode their purchasing power over time.

They’re struggling because no one ever taught them how inflation compounds over years and decades. Or how important it is to plan for rising prices, how futile it is to think about future spending in today’s dollars. And that blind spot is catching up with them today.

Sadly, many more Americans will likely find themselves in the same situation, struggling with basic expenses, because they never took steps to ensure a comfortable retirement. They never learned that one of the biggest pillars of a stable financial future is making sure that your savings can endure the inflation that never goes away.

You, however, are different. You’re seeing a first-hand example of how failing to plan for the future is planning to fail in the future. Hopefully it’s not too late to correct this trajectory. You can take action right now to secure your purchasing power by diversifying with inflation-resistant stores of wealth.