Eat more cookies

We did something really unusual last night. By that I mean something we haven’t done in years. We went out for a real sit-down dinner with friends.

Our destination? Texas Roadhouse on a Saturday night. Great ribs + cold beer = good time.

Here’s the crazy part. We called about a half hour ahead, and still we waited for almost an hour for a table. In this little town of about 40,000, people fill our restaurants – and occasionally overfill them – all the time. Texas Roadhouse is just the latest. It looks like all of our restaurants do a brisk business on any given night. And Saturday night? Everything is packed.

Now the main reason we don’t go out to real restaurants is that they’re expensive. Even the bill for our modest country fare (+ tip) came to $50 for the two of us. We’re not really struggling financially, but that’s a lot of money to us. What about all these alleged people who are struggling financially? Are they blowing their life savings on expensive restaurant dinners or were the people packed into the restaurants last night actually not struggling financially?

I think it’s the latter. There is plenty of money in this town and people keep spending it. Our roads are still filled with giant gas guzzling trucks. We have new neighborhoods popping up around town with homes twice as big and three times as expensive as ours. In our experience, it certainly looks like most people in this area are doing better than the average college professor. All of this leads us to ask: “Recession? What recession?”