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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.
Yeah, my (I'm late GenX) family got fast food as a very special treat, but my parents were probably in the 95th percentile for frugality (we hunted the vast majority of the meat we ate for the first decade of my life and my mom was an extreme couponer decades before it was a trend). Many of my friend's families paid extra for convienient food, with things like Schwann's (home delivered, frozen prepared entrees) or eating out more than weekly being very common.
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You can simply look up estimates of the number of restaurants in the US. There were 386k in 1982 and 789k today. Per capita that works out 166 per 100k and 220 per 100k population. Not a drastic increase over 40 years of economic and population growth, about 30% growth per capita for restaurants.
The equivalent expansive number for 1982 (including things like school cafeterias), taken from the National Restaurant Association's fact book for 1982, is 559k. 386k is the number of commercial food service establishments. 789k comes from the Pew analysis of SafeGraph data showing (sorry) 788k operational restaurants in the US. A better equivalent to the 1982 number might actually be 731k, taken from the NAICS 722 data for Q4 of 2025.
Even if we take your numbers as correct, it still doesn't support the 10 or 20 fold increase you explicitly told me you thought was plausible.
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