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Post-pandemic inflation has caused food costs to soar. The USDA predicts we could see a slight deceleration this year, but grocery and restaurant food prices are still on track to increase by 1.6% and 4.3%, respectively.
However, there’s one restaurant that’s somehow avoided the crunch of inflation: Bob’s Burgers.
Since premiering in 2011, Fox’s Emmy-winning animated series has become a modern classic, depicting the comedic struggles of the Belcher family as they navigate daily hijinks and keeping their restaurant afloat.
Like patriarch Bob Belcher, there are thousands of restaurant owners who are coping with a challenging industry. The pandemic decimated local restaurants, and with labor shortages and high food prices, the road to recovery has been laborious.
While restaurants have raise prices to offset inflation costs, I’ve noticed that across all 14 seasons, the prices at Bob’s Burgers have remained the same. Granted, we’re talking about a cartoon where the kids have been in the same grade since season one. But Bob’s Burgers is essentially a workplace comedy with a very working class family that, by and large, deal with many issues that restaurant owners can relate to.
So why not inflation?
[Image: FOX]
Inflation pushed the average cost of a beef burger in 2023 to nearly $16. A regular burger at Bob’s Burger comes in at just $5. And the “Burger of the Day,” which is often loaded with specialty, pricier ingredients (saffron, black garlic, kale, etc.), usually costs just 95 cents more.
According to Loren Bouchard, creator and executive producer of Bob’s Burgers, inflation simply doesn’t exist in Bob’s world because, ultimately, being too topical would become too distracting. “We’ve had this with technology [too],” he says. “Cell phones looked pretty different when we started. More people had flip phones and it started to feel distracting at a certain point.”
![Why food inflation hasn't hit "Bob's Burgers" 1 Why food inflation hasn't hit "Bob's Burgers"](https://i0.wp.com/images.fastcompany.net/image/upload/w_1200,c_limit,q_auto:best/wp-cms/uploads/2023/11/i-3-90990224-bobs-burgers.jpg?resize=640%2C320&ssl=1)
[Image: FOX]
Granted, Bob’s restaurant could be successful even with $5 burgers, especially when you consider that his food is often lauded as exceptional from everyday customers to show’s famed restaurateur Skip Marooch (voiced by Kumail Nanjiani). But the Belcher family continuously remains on the brink of bankruptcy.
“I always try to remind [the show’s writers] that the restaurant wouldn’t survive if they truly only had the customers that we see. What I always say is imagine that they did get a lunch rush but we didn’t see it,” Bouchard says. “You can’t do the math on Bob’s if you just count the number of people we see. But it’s hard to animate a crowd. And, of course, it’s fun to make fun of a struggling restaurant.”
Ultimately, Bob’s Burgers is a story about an underdog doing the best he can with what little he has. Part of the entertainment is watching Bob scrape by day after day even when certain aspects of his business do line up: the food is great, the prices even better, and still the restaurant is always in the red. But it’s Bob’s perseverance in the face of recurrent failure that’s enduring and reminiscent of the struggle most entrepreneurs have in reconciling their passion with profit and trying to do business the right way.
In the season seven episode “They Serve Horses, Don’t They?”, Bob goes against his own better judgment and orders meat from the supplier his neighbor and restaurant competitor Jimmy Pesto uses under the assumption that it’s the same quality beef at a fraction of the cost. As it turns out, it’s actually horse meat, and Bob gets pulled into a sting operation to expose the scam even if it means continuing to pay more for real beef.
In season 11’s “Romancing the Beef,” the Belcher family transforms Bob’s Burgers into the fine-dining restaurant Urge to capitalize on Valentine’s Day. It’s actually a massive success, and Bob gets to live out his fantasies of culinary grandeur. But, in the end, he wants to go back to his old restaurant, clearly intent on doing business his way versus what could be more profitable.
“[Bob] wants to say something with his food. He likes going to farmers markets and buying good ingredients. He takes chances, he combines flavors in ways that he likes to think have never been done before,” Bouchard says. “But I think he also doesn’t want to have a fancy restaurant in a lot of ways. He likes a diner. He likes a greasy spoon. He likes a mom-and-pop burger shop.”
Bob is the everyman entrepreneur. He’ll never compromise ingredients for the sake of price. He’ll pay extra to sprinkle chives on a burger or splurge on an espresso machine if he thinks it will elevate the customer experience—even if all of the above never translates into what most people would call a successful business.
“I think of it as a tiny bit of the curse of the job—a character who has to just carry a little more burden than he perhaps should. But I like to think it’s just a smidge of bad luck,” Bouchard says. “I guess that’s the thing about restaurants that I love. It reminds me of other creative endeavors, how anytime anyone sets out to do something that doesn’t make any sense and has a high chance of failure, yet they do it anyway.”
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