Do you think restaurants will lower the prices on their menus when food prices drop?

They will lower the prices only when it benefits them, if people will pay it they will keep charging it.
Fuel prices could come down fifty percent , and food and consumer goods would stay high as long as people will pay it.

I’m not sure but it will be awhile if so due to higher insurance rates, etc… I did hear that thing’s should be back to pre-Covid economy by late 2024. Fingers crossed!

No. Not voluntarily, and not on account of inflation going down.

The only things that will bring prices down will be nearby competitors lowering their prices.

No, but hopefully they’ll pass the extra profits onto their employees. Everyone is feeling inflation.

I would rather they raise the pay and get rid of tipping. I ate dinner at a very nice restaurant on Saturday, I was surprised when the little tipping suggestion at the bottom of the check wasn’t 15%/20%/25%, it was 25%/27.5%/30%.!

There is a very nice restaurant in New York, the North End Grill. They have a no tipping policy, yet their prices are competitive and the servers seem very happy.

@zenvelo Tipping has gotten out of hand. I know some say “if you can’t afford to tip, you shouldn’t eat out” but now there are people looking for tips for every little thing, and also, if people stop eating out, the wait staff and other restaurant workers will all be liad off, so that’s not really an effective solution.

I tip 20%, maybe a little more and I don’t tip on the tax.

Twice over last weekend I ran into the issue that @zenvelo raised. Each time I did my own multiplication, and didn’t use their highway robbery numbers.

I refuse to tip on sales tax amounts, so I generally go with 18% to compensate for that.

@zenvelo In my state and many others, the base pay for servers in like $2.45 . . .so they need tips !

I wouldn’t work for $2.45 with no tips ! ! ! ! !

@Tropical_Willie That’s why we need a cultural shift to realistic wages and an end to tipping.

@zenvelo move to Japan it is an insult to leave a tip !

Is there an exception to Minimum Wage for restaurant workers? $2.45 is below what I made as a janitor in 1982.

That was the last state I lived in @RocketGuy, I live in North Carolina now and “Tipped employees for whom the state minimum wage is $2.13 per hour as long as the hourly wage and tips together meet the minimum wage.”

https://squareup.com/us/en/the-bottom-line/managing-your-finances/guide-to-nc-minimum-wage

I suspect it would go like gas prices do. When prices go up, they go up quickly…almost overnight. But when oil prices drop, the prices drift back down much more slowly. I suspect restaurants would do the same. As prices come down, competition would drive the prices down. Some restaurants would see an opportunity to drop prices to get more customers used to coming to their restaurants. Would they ever come down to what they were before Biden took office? Unknown, but unlikely.

@RocketGuy In NYS, it’s a bit more complicated as it goes by county. New York City wages are always a bit higher than elsewhere because it’s so expensive to live there. Here’s the chart for NYS minimum wage and the minimum wage for tipped workers.

https://dol.ny.gov/minimum-wage-tipped-workers

So they have to pull in $5 worth of tips ($100 worth of dinner) per hour to make minimum wage. Joy!