Gen-Z’s Love of Take Out & Delivery Increasing Need for Greener Containers

Change naturally comes with new generations. Currently restaurants are experiencing big shifts based on demographic changes.

No, I’m not talking about Millennials, but Get-Z.

Generation Z, as they have been coined, consist of those born in 1995 or later. This generation makes up 25.9% of the United States population, the largest percentage, and contribute $44 billion to the American economy. By 2020, they will account for one-third of the U.S. population, certainly worth paying attention to.

Just so we’re clear:
A “Millennial” is a person reaching young adulthood around the year 2000.
Generation Z (also known as Post-Millennials, the iGeneration, Founders, Plurals, or the Homeland Generation) is the demographic cohort following the Millennials. (Huffington Post)

This young generation is having a big impact on the restaurant industry.

Twenty-four percent of Gen Zers order takeout three or four times in a typical week, which is more than any other generation, according to a study released last fall by the International Foodservice Manufacturers Association (IFMA) and the Center for Generational Kinetics. Comparatively, 21 percent of millennials, 17 percent of Gen Xers and 6 percent of baby boomers order takeout at the same rate. (Huffington Post)

Restaurants are responding to attract delivery & take out customers.

Delivery made up just 3 percent of total restaurant transactions in the year that ended in June, according to research firm The NPD Group. But interest in eating outside the confines of a traditional restaurant is clear. Customers only sat down to eat at restaurants 37 percent of time during the year that ended in June — with carryout representing a slightly larger piece of the pie (39 percent) and drive-thru visits accounting for 21 percent of restaurant transactions. And delivery growth also is in contrast to a slowdown in restaurant traffic overall, according to NPD. ?

Still, redesigning a restaurant to accommodate the burgeoning trend toward mobile ordering and meal delivery can be a risky move for restaurants, Roth said. For example, creating two lines for customers — one to wait for food ordered on the premises and the other to pick up mobile orders — makes sense, but it also could raise labor costs because more employees may be needed to staff both lines.

Those added costs can make a difference, especially in times of slower business. (Chicago Tribune)

For cities this might mean different needs for storefront restaurants — smaller dining rooms but more kitchen space if the 2 kitchen model is used. Remember when lines were to get a table? Now they’re to pick up orders.

All this take out & delivery means more single use packaging. I do like when restaurants have reusable;e to go containers, I have several I’ve been reusing for years.  The Green Dining Alliance looks at packaging and other aspects of restaurants:

While we see many different ways that St. Louis’ restaurants may work toward sustainability, all GDA restaurants must commit to our Core Concepts:

• Ban use of Styrofoam
• Utilize single-stream recycling 
• Phase in efficient lighting. 
• Set waste reduction and diversion goals, and share waste data with the GDA so that we can assess member restaurants’ environmental impact. (information kept private)
• Share baseline utility data so that the GDA can aggregate data for the region’s environmental impact (information kept private) (GDA Core Concepts)

See certified restaurants here.

Responses on the recent non-scientintific Sunday Poll were less than usual, but here are the results:

Q: When buying a dinner (vs cooking at home) what’s your preferred method?

• Dine in at restaurant 16 [76.19%]
• TIE 2 [9.52%]
  • Take out/grab & go/to go
  • Delivery
• Unsure/no answer 1 [4.76%]

I prepare most of our meals so when we pay for food I want to get away from home and have a server bring me food & beverage, but I’m not young,

— Steve Patterson

Learn From Embarrassing History, Don’t Brush It Under The Rug

Late last month New Orleans was in the news, causing me think about St. Louis’ own confederate statue. .

New Orleans has taken a first major step in fulfilling its 2015 promise to tear down four prominent Confederate statues, an attempt to scrub the city’s public spaces of what many see as white supremacist symbols.
City workers began removing the Battle of Liberty Place statue at 1:25 a.m. Monday in an effort to avoid disruption by protesters who want the monuments to stay, reported The Associated Press. Erected in 1891, the obelisk honors members of the Crescent City White League, a group of all-white Confederate veterans who killed members of the city’s post-Civil War integrated police force. (Huffington Post)

Someone at KMOX also thought about St. Louis:

While the city of New Orleans is removing its Confederate statues, a 32-foot tall monument to Confederate soldiers here in Forest Park still stands — two years after the Slay Administration began exploring how to remove it.

Now the point man on the project, Human Services Director Eddie Roth, is preparing to brief new Mayor Lyda Krewson on where the project stands.

“The most economical and preferred plan is one that would cost about $100,000,” Roth says. “It mainly involves burying the granite shaft in place in Forest Park where it will be preserved.”

Under the plan, the bronze face plate would be removed and stored someplace else. (KMOX)

Our confederate monument was placed in Forest Park in 1914 — a “gift” of the Daughters of the Confederacy.

Our monument, like those in many other cities, was part of an effort to revise history.

The significance of the UDC lies not in its present-day clout, which is negligible, but in its lasting contributions to history— both for good and for ill. From its inception in 1894 up through the 1960s, the UDC was the South’s premier social and philanthropic organization, an exclusive social club where the wives, sisters, and daughters of the South’s ruling white elite gathered to “revere the memory of those heroes in gray and to honor that unswerving devotion to principle which has made the confederate soldier the most majestic in history,” as cofounder Caroline Meriwether Goodlett grandly put it. At first, the UDC provided financial assistance and housing to veterans and their widows, offering a vital public service at a time when for all practical purposes most local and state governments in the South were nonfunctional and/or broke. Later, as the veteran population aged, the UDC built homes that allowed indigent veterans and their widows to live out their days with some measure of dignity. Long before there was such a thing as the National Park Service, the UDC played a crucial role in preserving priceless historic sites, war cemeteries, and battlefields across the South. At the same time, it embarked on a spree of monument building: most of those confederate monuments you can still find in hundreds of courthouse squares in small towns across the South were put there by the local UDC chapter during the early 1900s. In its way, the UDC groomed a generation of Southern women for participation in the political process: presidents attended its national convocations, and its voice was heard in the corridors of the U.S. Capitol.

But the UDC’s most important and lasting contribution was in shaping the public perceptions of the war, an effort that was begun shortly after the war by a Confederate veterans’ group called the United Confederate Veterans (which later became the Sons of Confederate Veterans—also still around, and thirty thousand members strong). The central article of faith in this effort was that the South had not fought to preserve slavery, and that this false accusation was an effort to smear the reputation of the South’s gallant leaders. In the early years of the twentieth century the main spokesperson for this point of view was a formidable Athens, Georgia, school principal named Mildred Lewis Rutherford (or Miss Milly, as she is known to UDC members), who traveled the South speaking, organizing essay contests, and soliciting oral histories of the war from veterans, seeking the vindication of the lost cause “with a political fervor that would rival the ministry of propaganda in any 20th century dictatorship,” Blight writes. (Salon)

I loath the confederate flag, but I don’t see how revising history again will make things right in the future. Instead of spending $100k to bury the monument we should spend that money on a new exhibit around  it talking about the Civi War, St. Louis’ role, the 20th century revision movement, and the 21st century movement to eradicate pro-confederate symbolism. Something powerful like Wall Street’s “Fearless Girl statue. Tell the story of the 150+ years since the end of the Civil War — Jim Crow laws, deed restrictions/Shelley vs Kraemer, segregation, Jefferson Bank protests, Ferguson, etc.

Burying the monument would be brushing an embarrassing moment under the rug.  “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” — click here for variations on this quote.

— Steve Patterson

Richard Serra’s ‘Twain’ Is 35, Remains Unloved By Most St. Louisans…Including Arts Patrons

Five years ago I’d hoped to have temporary lighting on Richard Serra’s Twain sculpture — to replicate the original lighting when it was dedicated on May 1, 1982. See We Should Restore “Twain’s” Original Lighting Scheme (1982 Video).

I had a lighting company interested in setting up a temporary display at no cost to taxpayers — money was needed to pay for security to make sure the lighting equipment wasn’t stolen, My attempts to get art patrons, such as Twain’s original benefactor Emily Pulitzer, to pay a couple of thousand dollars were unsuccessful.

Five years later the city block, across 10th Street from Citygarden, remains largely unused.

I contacted the Gateway Foundation last week. Hopefully I can interest them in making minimal improvements to the block, addressing the mud at Twain’s entrances, and funding new lighting.

— Steve Patterson

Finally Visited The National Blues Museum

Last month my husband and I finally visited the National Blues Museum, just a 15 minute walk from our loft. The museum opened in April 2016, but we never got around to visiting until recently. First, we had lunch a Sugarfire Smoke House located in the same building at 6th & Washington.

I’ve been a vegetarian for a quarter century now, but I have no problem eating at BBQ places — as long as they offer something like a portobello sandwich. Smart BBQ places do.

The museum isn’t large, but it’s well-organized. The displays  and signage is fresh looking.

There was a concert later in the evening, our tickets would’ve gotten into that as well. I’ll keep that in mind — will plan our next visit, followed by dinner and a blues concert.

Very glad to see the museum completed, I was a sceptic when I first heard the concept.

— Steve Patterson

Accessibility To Food Trucks Is Often Lacking Due To Location Issues

More than two decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed, the ongoing food truck revolution remains largely inaccessible to those of us who use wheelchairs. Not because of the tricks themselves, but because of where they park.

In early September a proposed food truck park was in the news:

St. Louis may soon get its first food truck park — a regular gathering spot for some of the area’s best-regarded mobile kitchens. The proposed site is on a stretch of South Vandeventer Avenue — not far from the popular Grove entertainment district — that officials hope to regenerate with new businesses.

Some planning remains, and the park’s developers have yet to choose the project’s name. But they have a site and hope to conduct a food truck pop-up event there this fall.

If plans work out, next spring a rotating assemblage of food trucks will begin to operate daily on what is now an overgrown lot next to the long-ago home of Liberty Bell Oil Co. The vacant building at 1430 South Vandeventer will be redone as the joint commissary for the food trucks. (Post-Dispatch)

My hope is if this moves forward it’ll be designed so everyone can patronize the food trucks. Often I can’t reach the trucks parked downtown at one of my favorite spots: Citygarden.

When I started blogging 12+ years ago I argued for more food carts to activate streets — food trucks weren’t a thing yet. I still wish food carts were more common because they trend to be easier to access in a wheelchair. But trucks have replaced carts so now we need to ensure the public can access them.

— Steve Patterson