The reality doesn't agree with you. In SF, for example, fine dining is doing well, while the mid range is slowly failing and being replaced by fast casual, where they focus on fast turnover. The only way to pay the bills seems to be to either be super high end (fewer customers overall, but at a much higher service level and price point), or just above fast food, where you serve a reasonable-quality menu, but items that can be prepared quickly, and served without waitstaff.
Restaurants that try to charge "too much for their station" don't last here.
Funny, I just wrote a reply to another post which explains exactly what you wrote.
> In SF, for example, fine dining is doing well, while the mid range is slowly failing and being replaced by fast casual, where they focus on fast turnover.
It has to do with readily available substitutes for a given price point affecting elasticity of demand. The type of food offered by a casual dining concept can be replaced by fast-casual, whereas higher end food has relatively inelastic demand, because it has fewer substitutes.
> The type of food offered by a casual dining concept can be replaced by fast-casual,
That's mostly not a change in type of food, just front-of-house service model. And casual and fast-casual both focus on turning tables, fast casual just has counter ordering (and often counter service for drinks) rather than full table service.
I commented on this elsewhere, but my general reaction is that it's an interesting change regardless.
I think there's a very plausible argument that Applebee's range restaurants are very labor-intensive without adding substantial value, and so they naturally get shut out of any market where labor is expensive. The "cheap hot meal" role is filled by fast food, while the "place to sit and chat" role is filled by everything from pubs (order at the counter, high margin alcohol) to dedicated desert places (order at counter, often cheap nonperishable ingredients).
But granting that it's not something to 'solve', it's still newsworthy. There are ~3M waitstaff jobs in the US, and despite tipped minimum wage it's often pretty well paid, with nonstandard hours that can help part-time students, households with two working parents, etc. If our biggest cities are no longer compatible with common forms of work, that's worth discussing and looking at the secondary impact of.
Isn't this literally indicative of the economy as a whole? The entire middle is being hollowed out. You've got to go high or go low, which is the same segregation we've seen in terms of wages.
Restaurants that try to charge "too much for their station" don't last here.