Peak Oil’s Impact: Dining Out

While rising gasoline prices at our local stations are the most immediate and obvious consequences of oil supply and demand problems, Peak Oil is about much more than how big a hit our wallets can take. It’s easy to get caught up with the financial impact in our own households, which may explain why there’s usually a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth when prices at the pump increase, and a settled calm once the prices drop to more tolerable levels.

We are not likely to have the luxury of complaining and then having the most visible symptom treated so that we can then carry on in some semblance of “same old, same old” for much longer. The immediate and obvious effects of Peak Oil may certainly ride on the wings of higher prices, but the underlying causes and their potentially crippling effects across a wide swath of industry and society will prove to be more enduring and damaging in the long run. At some point, most of us are simply not going to be able to afford the next price hike, and in that regard, high prices will cease to have such a visceral impact on our daily lives.

But long before our individual budgets reach the breaking point, Peak Oil will have served notice on scores of other aspects of life-as-we-once-knew-it that change is coming. Prices have almost always been the sole concern for most of us. Early 1970’s shortages aside, we’ve never really concerned ourselves with whether or not we can get our tanks filled. How much is it going to cost? has been the entire conversation. Peak Oil is going to add a few more topics.

I recently posted about my trip to New Orleans during the Mardi Gras “festival,” and briefly noted some concerns about rising oil prices as they affect restaurants (and hotels). Certainly as delivery and product prices increase, restaurants of all kinds are feeling the pinch just a bit more each day. Given recent economic conditions across the nation, it’s safe to say that the food and beverage industry has not been immune to the Great Recession.

Most of us have in some manner curtailed our away-from-home dining plans. We’re all being a bit more cautious with our funds, and so we don’t go to the movies as often, or eat at nicer restaurants as frequently, or we cut back on travel. If we gained more confidence in our individual (and national) financial well-being, it’s probably safe to assume that most of us who have cut back on dining out will ease our way back into that usually enjoyable social activity.

But just in case the first message above didn’t catch your attention, I’ll repeat it here: Peak Oil is going to be about a lot more than just how much? As demand increases, and the cumulative effects of decreased investments over the years began to create havoc with supply (to say nothing of the fact that what is now being explored is on the decline in most parts of the world, or more difficult to extract, or suffers from more political/above-ground interference, or INSERT FACTOR HERE), our only concern will no longer be limited to how much? Soon enough (and picking the month and year when is entirely pointless), can I even buy gas today/nearby? will become a more frequent refrain.

As the size of the pie shrinks and even more hungry consumers sit at the table for their piece, even the most inept math student will quickly understand that not everyone will be served equally or even sufficiently. Some may have to do without; others will get a much smaller piece than is customary. Others may be told to come back only if another pie becomes available. It is that elementary.

And when this begins to happen, we’re all going to be making more sacrifices. Dining out will surely become much more of a challenge, and one which more and more of us will eventually decide is no longer feasible. Gas prices may simply be too high to warrant trips for a need we can just as easily (and, we hope, at less cost) substitute for at home. The simple steak and baked potato sitting on my dining room table may not satisfy nearly as much as a preferred Natural Angus Bavette Steak with wild mushroom risotto and bourbon-tinge reduction sauce served with fresh-baked Parmesan crusted rolls, and there may not be soft-jazz piped in from speakers placed unobtrusively in the far corners of the room as we’re bathed in warmth from the nearby fireplace, and I may very well be dining alone or (preferably) with my lovely wife rather than with my wife and several friends whom we see not nearly as often anymore, but I won’t go to bed hungry, and my wallet won’t suffer nearly as much trauma.

It’s just as likely that many of us will stay home and make our own ham and cheese on rye sandwich rather than making a run to the Subway sub shop two miles away or the Wendy’s at the food court in the local Mall six miles down the road.

Doing without a small treat like dining out, or losing the opportunity to socialize with friends may not strike any of us as an especially egregious consequence. Most of us wouldn’t even think of that as a direct consequence of declining oil production and limited supplies, but that’s the type of change we’ll see all too often in a world where gas prices are increasingly prohibitive, and/or supplies are simply not available today or this week or in our city or town.

I would certainly hope that that scenario, if it does materialize (which it will if we continue to sit on our hands and do nothing, or wait for others to do something, or just pretend that all will be well eventually), will be many years down the road, but I would not want to bet a lot of money on that happening. I certainly don’t think we’ll be looking at that unpleasant prospect later this year, or next summer, or soon beyond that. But the truth is that it’s not the product of an over-active, morose imagination. It’s all about those damned annoying facts.

Those kinds of trade-offs will increase in the years to come. Perhaps right now it might not seem like such a big deal, or even any kind of deal. But quality-of-life is not always or often measured in dollars and cents. When the customary social activities we engage in start dropping away because we can’t even afford to get “there,” wherever there might be, we will begin to feel the squeeze. Many of us now do not engage in those familiar social activities as or as often as we once did simply because of financial concerns. Tighter budgets require different spending priorities. Unpleasant though it may be, it’s an understood “sacrifice.” The expectation has always been that at some point life will return to the once-familiar “normal”, and thus soon enough we’ll be back meeting with friends at restaurants and ballgames and a host of other options.

But Peak Oil is different. Peak Oil is not a budget matter. Peak Oil is about having the energy needed at all. If one simply cannot get gas for their car—regardless of price—because there is no gas available that day or week, or what is then available has to likewise be “budgeted”, then that kind of a social change or “sacrifice” takes on a different hue. We’re not prepared to have those kinds of options denied to us entirely. Problems which cannot be rectified by money are a different breed.

And what of the restaurants who’ve long relied on our faithful appearances every couple of months? When a not-inconsequential number of diners stop patronizing those establishments, it’s very obvious what will happen soon enough. Many are no doubt experiencing those consequences in this moment, and surely have been for several years now. And when the employees are suddenly out of a job, and the chef finds herself just as unemployed with no prospects at all nearby because every other restaurant is suffering just as much, what then? What happen to the merchants they frequent when there is no longer a salary to spend because there are too few customers to prop up the restaurant? What of their suppliers? The drivers who deliver their goods? And the merchants all of these others in turn frequent? And then their employees? Getting the picture?

There aren’t that many dots to connect … it’s not as though this a new economic problem never before encountered. Multiply that by many thousands of neighborhoods and towns and counties and cities and metro-regions and states and pretty quickly, there’s a problem.

Peak Oil Matters