Can Gen Z’s nostalgia save chain restaurants?

When you walk into a chain restaurant, time stands still. For some young people, that’s the whole point.

Ana Babic Rosario, a professor of marketing at the University of Denver, calls this “emotional time travel.”

With the country in an unstable economic time, potentially edging toward recession, those memories become more potent, Babic Rosario said. “We tend to crave some of those nostalgic moments because we think they’re more stable,” she said. “That’s how our mind tends to remember the past — more rosy than it really was.”

That’s true for Bea Benares, 27, who said she looked forward to meals at Outback Steakhouse and “eating the bread and sitting down with my family.”

“Now with fast causal, you may not sit down and you go your separate ways afterward,” Benares said, referring to ea