Eating out is getting more expensive faster than everything else

July 1, 2026 · 読了6分

The baseline numbers

Vietnam's CPI rose 3.31% across 2025, according to the General Statistics Office. That is headline inflation, measured across the entire basket of goods and services.

Break out food service away from home and the picture changes. Prices for eating out rose 3.81% in 2025, above the headline rate.

In the first half of 2026 the gap widened. The food and catering services group rose 4.79% over the first six months of 2026.

Put simply: eating out is getting expensive faster than the rest of life.

Why it feels worse than the number

A 4.79% increase does not read as alarming. But the felt experience usually runs ahead of the figure, for a few fairly specific reasons.

• Eating out is a very high-frequency expense. A small increase multiplied by thirty occasions a month stops being small.
• Prices rarely rise smoothly; they rise in steps. A bowl of pho does not go up 4.79%. It holds for months and then jumps by a round number one morning.
• Delivery fees, service fees and platform fees sit outside the food price. What you feel is the order total, and the total has more moving parts than the menu does.
• You remember old prices for a long time. The anchor in your head might be from three years ago rather than last year.

How consumers are responding

According to NielsenIQ, published 22 May 2026, 57% of consumers said they were cutting spending in 2026, up from 43% in 2025.

That is a substantial jump inside a single year. It suggests belt-tightening has stopped being the behaviour of a subset and become the behaviour of a majority.

It is more complicated for younger consumers

There is a detail here worth sitting with. According to the Sun Life Asia Financial Resilience Index published in June 2025, 87% of Gen Z said they were willing to spend on non-essentials regardless of their financial situation. In the same survey, 74% said they would cut back if their finances worsened.

These two numbers do not contradict each other, but they operate on different levels. One is an attitude in the present. The other is an intention about a hypothetical future.

The distance between "I would cut back if I had to" and "I am spending right now" is familiar to anyone who has ever written a budget. Future intentions are easy to form. The decision at 1am is a different exercise.

Where the small orders disappear

The notable thing about food spending is not the large orders. The expensive dinner with friends gets remembered, and it usually gets budgeted for in advance.

What does not get counted is the small late-night order. It sits below the threshold of notice. It never comes up in any conversation you have with yourself about money, and it never appears in any spreadsheet.

But it runs at the highest frequency of any food expense, and frequency is what determines the total.

What this app actually addresses

Not much, and it is better to say so.

Table for None does not make food cheaper and does not replace a budget. It does not tell you what you should spend, it does not look at your account, and it offers no financial advice.

What it does is narrow: it gives you a place for the craving to pass, and it records the money you did not spend on those occasions. If that number reaches 600,000đ in a month, that is 600,000đ of small orders you would not otherwise remember placing.

The hardest expense to cut is not the large one. It is the one small enough that you never counted it.

The price environment of the last two years does not require you to live austerely, and this post is not suggesting that you should. It just makes skipping an order worth slightly more than it used to be.