Let's eat out!

"Choices"

I ate out 240 times between March 2010 and January 2011, so 71% of the days you'd have a good chance of finding me at an establishment that sells prepared consumables. I'm counting Jamba Juice, Starbucks, Pizzaria Bianco to Wineries in Jerome, AZ and everything in between. With Argentina around the corner, I found myself creating a budget for the trip when I realized "damn eating out everyday  for 10 days is going to get expensive". Then I wondered, how many times do I eat out now, and how much do I spend? Turns out if you keep track of all your expenses on a monster excel spreadsheet that categorizes every dollar spent for a year, you can get your answer in less then fifteen minutes.

The results were close to my expectations; I frequented fast food restaurants more often than I'd like to admit, and spent more money at expensive restaurants. I suspect most people could speak to those results without a fancy spreadsheet. However thanks to the spreadsheet I can mine for interesting tidbits like...51% of my restaurants were unique visits, 123 of my overall visits were to places I've never revisited! Granted some of the visits were out of state, which could account for how I spent almost $4 more per meal on average versus restaurants I've visited twice or more. Upon further analysis, as the number of times I visit a restaurant the overall amount I spend at the restaurant goes down. The statement holds true for all restaurants except for Fast-Food which is a gold standard in terms of stability, the amount of money spent is fairly constant. However my first memory of east fast food was throwing up after eating McDonald's, so maybe I'm still scarred from that experience and refuse to spend more than $5-6.   

Getting back to unique restaurant visits, Why so many? It’s not because I'm a picky eater, hardly, I'm the guy that ate Chipotle almost everyday for 2-3 years! It's because my girlfriend insists on finding the newest undiscovered "non-chain" restaurant in town, which my adventurous side agrees with. The caveat however is that she's a vegetarian who refuses to eat salads, good luck finding a restaurant that is unique, caters to a non-salad eating vegetarian and has good wine. The graph below outlines MY struggle during the time it takes for her to choose a restaurant.

We've all experienced this curve at one point or another, fortunately for my girlfriend the restaurant decision is usually made a few seconds before I reach my "Very Grumpy" point. The times when I reach the far end of the curve we'll usually opt to eat-in, we ate out 240 times. We're pretty damn good at picking a restaurant.

Side Note: I typed this blog in Notepad, which does not have a spell check, after I finished I copy/pasted into MS Word, only to find that I’d spelled “restaurant” incorrectly EVERY single time!...there were a lot of red squiggly lines :(