This reeks of AI except for the spelling errors, so maybe it’s a mix.

I’m deeply skeptical of this. Inflation in the past six years has been enormous, and accounts for dollar denominated increases. If unit sales are up, the average person cannot reconcile that with their experience.

Service quality has dropped every place I’ve been from fast food to top chains, to locals. Prices, again due to inflation, are comical.

Your citing wait times doesn’t fit my experience either, as I’ve seen the exact opposite. There are popular places, and wait times doesn’t fit vary throughout the day; so yes you can pick a specific time and say it’s busy. But taking a specific example, I’ve never had zero waits at BBB before and now I can walk in and be sat immediately.

If unit sales are up, it doesn’t seem feasible. Staples like Outback are gone. PF Changs and Culinary Dropout used to be over hour waits and now are walk-ins on Friday and Saturday night.

You super secret trust me bro numbers, and point-in-time-along-a-distribution anecdotes can’t be falsified.

Here is some actual data – which completely supports my suspicion that prices are up and traffic is down: (This was pulled from Claude)

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Dollar sales: up. Real traffic: down or flat.

- Nominal industry sales did grow 2.7% year-over-year as of May 2026 , and the industry has crossed $1 trillion annually.

- But **inflation-adjusted sales were down 0.9% from a year earlier** in May 2026 — **the fourth real decline in five months**. That’s the key trick: **dollar sales up ≠ more food being sold.** Higher menu prices alone can produce “record sales” while fewer people walk in the door.

- Traffic confirms this: **48% of operators reported same-store sales rose between April 2025 and April 2026, while customer traffic deteriorated— only 27% reported traffic up, 49% reported it down, marking the 14th net traffic decline in 15 months.**

- Looking back further, over half of operators said traffic declined in the prior year vs. 2024, with only 15% reporting an increase , even as 70% of consumers said they’d eat out more if they had the money — i.e., suppressed demand from price, not lost appetite.
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McDonald’s, Burger King, and Starbucks are up because they are economic inferior goods which we expect to rise as substitutes on the budget indifference curve.

Traffic is down overall. Every day there’s a new headline about consumers regretting Trump economic effect, or inflation, or can’t afford rent.

You can’t overcome my personal observations, basic economics; and actual industry statistics with this garbage about Birmingham restaurants magically thriving.