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Apply the burrito test to your own life. When your father was your age, was a decent burrito available at a nearby restaurant at any price, let alone $20? Unless you live in certain places like California, the answer is almost certainly "no."
Also, how often would his father go for a burrito? Not in cases where it's logical (like when travelling, or something unexpected happened) or as a social occasion, but just "I don't feel like cooking, or I don't feel like eating what we have at home, I want a restaurant burrito"). Compared to OP himself. I dunno for him, but ordering or eating out due to simple laziness or "cravings" was something that happened on a yearly basis to my family growing up. Weekly for me. The avocado toast meme is straightforwardly true, just on work lunches over 15 years of working every day downtown, I spent as much extra over cooking my lunches as I have been able to save for my retirement. I would have had doubled my net worth that I accumulated on my own had I been smarter exclusively on work lunches, if nothing else. I am, and I assume many if not most in my generation, THAT bad with managing my expenses.
Now I find myself kicked back up to the same point my parents were at my age due to inheritance and I am desperately praying to find the strength to do better this time, but still. I'm not sure we can blame the economy for most of it. I would more likely blame the culture for creating a generation or two with an attitude to "small" expenses that basically assign them a cost of 0$ and let that balloon into giant amounts.
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.
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.
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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