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One other thing to compare is business and health regulations. Compliance with that is certainly more involved and costly today than in 1940 and would account for part of the price.

If anything, I think they've probably decreased ("shrinkflation").

Restaurant portion sizes have definitely increased - a lot - since the 1940s-50s. Maybe some minor pullback the last few years but still way larger than back then. A McDonald's Quarter-pounder was considered very large, that was in 1971, many sit-down restaurant burgers today are 5-8 oz.

A good rule of thumb is to ask "are you paying mostly for human labor or for machine labor"? The former is likely to be more expensive now than it was in the past and the latter is likely to be less expensive, all relative to general inflation prices.

A hot dog / hamburger at a diner is mostly human labor, so you'd expect it to be cheaper in the past.

Things just don’t really convert neatly because the shape of what people spend money on in life hasn’t evolved uniformly.

Food appears somewhat cheaper, housing much cheaper; but clothing and tools/appliances were much more expensive. Things like student debt and healthcare costs are also interesting to compare and wildly differ over time & place.

Also common for the average middle class person to spend a sizable percentage of their income on travel/vacation today; as I understand it that was quite uncommon before the mid 20th century.

Well, the $5.14 figure is using the generalized inflation number derived by tracking the price of a specific basket of goods over time, across the entire country. This is a reasonable number to pick.

If you narrow down to Food for all Urban Consumers[1], it shifts to more like $5.24. If you look at "Food away from home in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA, urban wage earners and clerical workers, not seasonally adjusted" that number moves to $7.60. Which confirms your intuition: restaurant prices are way higher than the overall inflation rate predicts.

How do we explain the difference? A variety of ways. Maybe the burgers you get are "better" in some way. Bigger. Better cut of meat. More veggies and toppings. I wasn't around in 1959 and never ate at that specific diner, but it's a real possibility. In fact, this is explicitly called out in the FAQ[3]:

> Specifically, in constructing the "headline" CPI-U and CPI-W, the BLS is not assuming that consumers substitute hamburgers for steak. Substitution is only assumed to occur within basic CPI index categories, such as among types of ground beef in Chicago. Hamburger and steak are in different CPI item categories, so no substitution between them is built into the CPI-U or CPI-W.

There's also some other complicating factors to account for, like coupons and bundling. Like consider Applebee's Really Big Meal Deal deal. "NEW Big Bangin’ Burger with unlimited fries & soda, still just $9.99" Or you can order just the burger for... $15.99[4]. I don't even know how BLS copes with that and am sorta guessing they just take the a la carte prices for consistency, even though that likely overstates price levels consumers actually pay?

[1]: https://data.bls.gov/dataViewer/view;jsessionid=3A241A4C4F0A... [2]: CWURS12ASEFV [3]: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/common-misconceptions-abo... [4]: https://www.applebees.com/en/menu/handcrafted-burgers/big-ba...

Dicks in Seattle is currently only 5.75 for the deluxe; everything else is less! And IMO, very good for the money.

https://ddir.com/menu

Dick's Drive in Seattle (IMHO an expensive city) charges $5.75 for their deluxe burger on Doordash.

https://www.doordash.com/store/dick's-drive-in-seattle-77050...

Basket goods, basically.

Price of good i x Quantity of good i. Quantity is fixed year to year. So a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk, a TV, etc.

Sum those up across a reasonably representative basket, then compare that sum to the same quantity and new prices in a future year.

sum(P_i_new year x Q_i) / sum(P_i base year x Q_i) - 1 --> change in CPI

Hamburgers might be more expensive, but TVs, toilet paper, and dog kibble might not be.

There are two diners near me (in NYC) where a burger is $5.25/$5.50 respectively.

(I don’t disagree with you directionally though; I think a nontrivial aspect of this is shifting expectations/norms around what passes for food service. Americans broadly want their food - even diner food - to be upclassed beyond a plain hamburger on a white bread bun.)

That's the point. Burgers are more expensive (relative to "all" other goods) compared to back then.

Counter service family joints absolutely in the $5 area for standard ol' boring 1/4/lb. Maybe your definition of diner is different? There's a place by me with diner in the name that has a burger for $4.99.

The Market Basket used to calculate the BLS CPI changes over time, which can make long range comparisons difficult.

I’ve read of political influence on the market basket to lower the reported rate of inflation by the incumbent party, but I’m not educated enough on the topic to give an opinion on if it happens.

That may be the point. Simple inflation adjustment gives us x but the real price is more or less than x. Why is that?

+$65 too :)

I'm shocked that Tops earned #1 -- they did a remodel a few years ago and started taking reservations (and turning people away during busy periods if they didn't have one), and it's much less of a diner and much more of a restaurant nowadays.

Also, the Bendix Diner is closed, likely permanently, because of fire code violations.

And people not even from the states (like me) know about NJ diners because one saw the birth of Unicode :)

Your first link is a restaurant in a shopping mall. It has the interior facade of being a diner, and it serves...avocado bites, spicy chicken nachos, kimchi burgers, etc. Not really the same!

Vegas has an eiffel tower too...

Fun to see all that, but curious why I haven't seen any on any of my trips across the UK and Ireland. I even asked some locals and they did not know of any diners anywhere in the country. I would've thought they would've been all over it.

Have been to both. Apart from the decor there is absolutely nothing diner about it. The first one especially has terrible food.

> Something you've got to realize is that this form of culture is something that has gone far beyond America's borders. To the European, it is the very pinnacle of "American Food" -- and 50s/60s themed diners are all over the place.

What do they serve?

I think there's a difference between the "squeeze-in" style diners and simply American-style diners like the ones you've posted. A lot of the nostalgia comes from the tiny prefab buildings that barely manage to fit a bar and row of booth seats. Those are the ones from the movies that feel more authentic/classic in person, at least to me.

Thanks I have thought about that, but somehow it does not work with me. Fresh food is something else (and my assumption is the food is fresh, even if it is just heating/grilling)

My favorite is Holders Country Inn. I used to go to the one in Cupertino before it burnt down. They moved, this was on Deanza long time back, and the one on Wolfe does not have the same old diner feeling, it is for the next gen :) Now I go to the one on Saratoga. And while I do not go as often to other places, I have been to and liked Hobees, then there is one Joe's near Half Moon Bay. We go there as a family when we hike at Cowell Purisima trail nearby. And while I am rambling about places to eat, a recent non-diner discovery has been El Caminito on El Camino Real.

I used to love Alice's Restaurant in 2014-2019, but moved away, so idk what it's like today.

Not OP but I'd recommend the Peninsula Fountain Grill in Palo Alto. Peter's Cafe isn't bad either if you've got time to kill near the Millbrae CalTrain station.

> Is there a town somewhere where everyone is over 45 and there is no cell service and a full meal is $5?

Yes, but they're suspicious of outsiders and newcomers. They're afraid the newbies will vote away everything that makes that town feel like home.

Your imagined past was enabled on the back of exploitation poor people and minorities.

Yeah, chain restaurants have dominated most of the market everywhere out through and including the exurbs.

But if you go to somewhere deeply rural you can still find cheap crappy diner food.

WH is all over the place in the US. I live in CO and go regularly. I’m 90% sure I saw one when I was in Utah.

Bonus, there's a solid chance of being ringside to an epic local MMA fight.

It'll pay for itself!