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Restaurants would basically have not existed before the 1990s if people ate out as infrequently as you imply. There are stats on food spending at and away from home and since the 1980s the share of food spending at restaurants has gone from maybe 40% to 55%, not increased by a factor of 52 from people going yearly to weekly.
There were a lot fewer restaurants. I am gen x. When I was a kid, we ate out 4 times a year - for the family birthdays. Pizza Hut. My parents went to a nice restaurant once a year. On road trips - driving to a relative's house and camping for overnight was our travel mode - we ate (sandwiches and fruit) and drank (water, from home) out of a cooler in the car.
We were a typical middle class family. No fast food. No snacks from the drug store or gas store. My dad brown bagged it to work. We thought my grandparents were rich because when we visited we would eat at Howard Johnsons after church.
Now in my typical suburban neighborhood I am a mile or less walk away from like 10 different eateries. Not counting the 3 bars and 2 coffee shops. The suburban method of eating in the 70s and 80s could not support what's available in my similar neighborhood now.
I still don't eat out much. It feels like a lot of money I could better allocate elsewhere. Like on my bougie beans.
If your middle class family was truly representative of the average consumer back then in never buying fast food or snacks from the drugstore or gas station, there wouldn't be fast food restaurants or snacks offered at the drugstore in the first place because the market would be at least an order of magnitude smaller.
It's quite clear that people do eat out more these days but taking anecdotes like yours as representative would exaggerate the scale of the change between generations. I think it's plausible people eat out maybe twice as often as in 1980, not 10 or 20 times as much, which is what your story or the one above implies to me.
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I'm not sure exactly how the difference is made. It's the experience I had and most people I know had. Maybe I'm in a bubble. Maybe people went out socially more often? My local Wendy's, the closest fast food to me, seems to be surprised and unprepared whenever I decided to go there in person. They have a normal sized for a fast food restaurant dining area, but it's always empty. Even the drive through seems underutilized. The staff is mostly just fulfilling doordash/uber eats orders non-stop.
In general the cost of ingredients and food has gone down compared to wages, so I would imagine we've invented new ways of making fast food more expensive to compensate. Having everything delivered would be one.
I ate out somewhat less as a kid too, but not quite as infrequently as you describe. I've seen many other people make the same argument as you though. There's probably some degree of social bubble effects, maybe you're upwardly mobile, and I would also guess that parents with young kids tend to eat out less often than people at other stages of life.
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Franchise fees and real estate costs have gotten bonkers over the last ten years. Unless you're a real estate company masquerading as a fast food joint like McDonald's, this can be back-breaking.
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