Guardian UK: The days of the boozy business lunch are over

[marmar]

The death of the lunch
The days of the long boozy business lunch are over. With expense accounts cut to the bone and restaurants closing down, Stuart Jeffries mourns the end of a British institution

Stuart Jeffries
The Guardian, Friday 6 March 2009


There used to be something called The Reach. If you were invited out to a business lunch, you might, out of sheer misguided politeness, reach towards the bill when it arrived. Just to show willing. Not that you seriously expected to pay. "Inevitably what happened was that the person who had invited you would rush to grab the bill before you got it. It was like two gunslingers trying to be the fastest draw in the west, and you always secretly knew you were going to lose." So says a fund-raising director for a large UK charity.

"Now what happens is that you'll reach - and find that you're paying. Sometimes it's even worse than that: you're invited out for lunch by a donor and when the bill comes and you offer, just to be polite, to go 50-50, they accept! That puts someone like me in a very invidious position. I don't really have an expense account - we're a charity, for crying out loud! - but you don't want to upset someone who may well be significantly bankrolling my charity at some future point." Perhaps understandably, she doesn't want to be named.

Lunchtime etiquette has changed as diners adjust to lean times. Shrinking bonuses and the widespread abolition of expense accounts mean that if people go for a sitdown lunch at all, they are less likely to pay the bill. "Businesses are cutting down on their expense accounts and so there's generally less week-time dining out than there was six months ago," says Peter Backman, managing director of Horizons, a company that monitors the restaurant business.

In New York, lunch is reportedly a dying institution. A recent article in the New York Times was headlined: "At the power lunch, the check is kryptonite". It reported that even press officers were declining to take out reporters for lunch. Something similar is happening over here, showing how crazy the credit crunch has become. Time was that a journalist was always a good bet for a free lunch, not least because newspaper ethics historically demanded that the journalist did more than just reach for the bill, for fear of being schmoozed. It isn't like that any more: the media, like everywhere else, is cutting back on expense-account lunches as advertising revenue plummets. Instead of lunch, with wine, business meetings are more likely now to be conducted over lattes or, once the weather warms up, sandwiches in the park. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/mar/06/credit-crunch-lunch

[virgogal]

1. And good riddance. I had a boss who was useless in the PM.

Nice guy,though.

[marmar]

2. My dad would often say of certain people at his job:

"He's not very reliable, especially after lunch."