Lunch, Gordon Gekko famously quipped, is for wimps.
Time has not been kind to many of the beliefs held by Michael Douglas’s character in the 1987 film Wall Street. The slicked-back hair and braces no longer look cool, and his claim that corporate greed is good is outmoded — but his brutal dismissal of the midday meal looks little short of visionary.
Lunch is dying out at all levels of American society, and its demise is becoming a serious problem for the restaurant industry. Last year Americans lunched out less than at any time in the past four decades, according to the NPD Group of market researchers. They made 433 million fewer trips to restaurants than in 2015, at a loss to the industry of