The 99¢ Menu is Now the… $1.79 Menu?!

Tales of Recession Dining, aka The 99¢ menu at Wendy’s is now the $1.79 menu!
My husband got back from his 2 week exile business trip to a remote village and we went restaurant and fast food crazy! We’re normally very well behaved when it comes to not eating out, but this weekend qualified as an exception. We went to Denny’s Friday night after I picked him up from the airport, Wendy’s Saturday before our movie date and Taco Bell on Sunday after some errands. Needless to say, we’re off fast food until the next qualified exception (probably a few months!). However, our restaurant experiences were enlightening ones, and I’ll tell you why.
Since we don’t go to restaurants normally, I’ve been taking it on good faith t o hear my blog friends talk about the restaurants raising menu prices while decreasing portions. Boy was it shocking to see first-hand!
Denny’s
The days of yore: Denny’s cheeseburgers were large restaurant-sized juicy grilled burgers. You got a generous helping of fries which occupied all the empty space on the plate, and the meal was so large it was hard for me to finish.
Now: The cheeseburger was almost the size of McDonalds fare… a super thin, dry meat patty was surrounded on its plate by a single layer of french fries (about 1/3 the normal serving size, spread out over the whole plate 1-fry deep)!
Wendy’s
The good old days: Juicy hot burgers, made to order (if you asked for something special, at least – then they made you a fresh one).
Now: We order 2 cheeseburgers, one for each of us. Both: no onions. His: no pickles. Mine: extra pickles. Pretty simple, or so I thought.

Round 1: We got our order and sat down to discover 2 identical cheeseburgers with both onions and pickles! Not only were our burgers wrong, the meat was old & cold. Hubby took them back to the counter.
Round 2: He sat down with 2 different burgers. We opened them to discover that neither had onions, but both had pickles. And they’d forgotten to put cheese on both of our cheeseburgers! Hubby went back to the counter again.
Round 3: This time he sat down with 2 new burgers. They didn’t take back the last 2 wrong ones, so we now had 4 burgers at our table and 2 had gone into the trash behind the counter. All the ingredients were right this time, but the burgers were barely warm. We were now in danger of missing our movie, so we just ate the last set of cheeseburgers and took our extras with us. We could at least add slices of cheese to them at home.

Beside the cooking difficulty, the other issue of interest at Wendy’s was the menu’s inflation. The 99¢ value menu which contains side dishes and 4-piece chicken nuggets has been inflated to the $1.79 menu. The prices of all combo meals were also about $2 higher than the last time we visited a Wendy’s restaurant.
I feel compelled to deliver these basic observations to the restaurant/franchise owners of Denny’s and Wendy’s (and all restaurant owners, for that matter).
To Denny’s: I understand that food costs are up, I really do. But if you’re going to shrink the portions, use smaller plates so it’s not so ugly and obvious! One more word of advice: if you’re cutting the beef portion by 1/3 for a cheeseburger, please, for the decency of cheeseburgers everywhere: cut the cooking time by 1/3 as well so we’re not eating cardboard!
To Wendy’s: I understand that food prices are high, and restaurants are affected by them as much as consumers. However, I have to wonder if the prices are up so much because they actually made 6 cheeseburgers to fill the order we placed for 2 cheeseburgers! How much perfectly good food goes into the trash can or walks out the door for free, and the extra expense is passed onto the consumer by way of higher menu prices?!
And there you have it folks, our intriguing tales of shrinking food, rising prices, and poor service in the thick of Recession Dining!