Concerts. Sporting events. Restaurants. Bars. Theme parks. Coffee shops. Almost anywhere a person might go out for entertainment nowadays, costs are high and rising at a rate substantially faster than overall inflation.
For some people, it can feel like the only affordable option in this economy is to just stay home.
Lucia Krekorian, 22, moved to the District when she graduated from college in the spring. A self-described “budget freak,” she quickly decided that happy hours on weeknights were prohibitively expensive. On the weekends, she allows herself to buy one drink, and once a week, she meets her best friend out for dinner. That once-a-week meal, she said, is “something that’s gotten harder to justify but also feels, like, deeply important for us to do.”
Entertainment prices have been surging for years, dramatically outpacing inflation even at a time of high overall costs.
From 2000 to 2026, economy-wide price levels increased 87 percent. The cost of concert tickets rose faster, more than doubling in that time, and the cost of sports tickets shot up 123 percent.
Movie tickets have stayed more on pace with inflation, but costs are sometimes far higher than average in big cities. And with the ever-increasing price of the popcorn bucket, a family outing to the cinema has gone from ordinary weekend fare to out of reach for some.
The price of recreation at home, meanwhile, has stayed well below inflation. That category, which includes televisions and hobby materials, rose 37 percent over the quarter-century, 50 points below overall inflation.
This year, the trend has continued. Food away from home, for instance, is 3.4 percent more expensive in 2026 compared with last year, while food at home is only 2.2 percent pricier. Plus, if people want to go out, there’s the gas to get there, up a whopping 27 percent in the past year largely as a result of the U.S. war in Iran.
Meanwhile, many forms of at-home entertainment have seen only modest recent price increases or even price cuts. Televisions are up just 1 percent since last year, and games and hobby equipment saw a similar slight increase. Smartphone prices are down 12 percent since last year, and scrolling for hours on the internet costs next to nothing.
Free recreational options exist, of course — libraries, parks, a walk outdoors with a friend. But those activities aren’t always included in research on entertainment.
Hari Natarajan, a business professor at the University of Miami who has studied ticket pricing, said concert promoters and professional sports teams realized after the pandemic that Americans were exceptionally eager to return to live entertainment, and willing to pay for it.
Popular musicians’ “pricing power was higher than they thought,” Natarajan said. “Every time you increase price, there is a fear that you’re going to lose demand. Once you get a signal from demand that the price still maintains, that gives you greater confidence to go further. … The market is telling them that [customers are] still going to pay the price and still going to pay to come to the concert.”
Natarajan’s research found that many venues have increased the price of their cheapest tickets by roughly 20 percent but have hugely increased the number of tickets they sell at the highest prices, targeted to the wealthiest consumers looking for ultra-luxe experiences. That shift has taken away tickets from the mid-priced sections of the venue.
Natarajan shared a hypothetical venue’s thinking: “Previously I had 500 of these $10,000 tickets, and 9,500 $100 tickets. I shifted the balance to 1,000 of the $10,000 tickets, and 9,000 of the $100 tickets, and I make those $120. It fundamentally changes the average ticket price.”
The highly detailed American Time Use Survey has shown Americans spending an increasing amount of time at home and decreasing time on several specific out-of-the-house activities, for reasons pertaining not just to cost but also to the rise of remote work and changing patterns of how people socialize and communicate.
The share of people who spent time at arts and entertainment events dropped by more than 20 percent from 2019 to 2025, for instance, as did the share of people who went out to eat and drink on an average day. Americans did more than 9 percent of their eating in restaurants and bars in 2014, and less than 7 percent a decade later.
UCLA researchers found an ongoing and accelerating trend: Americans spent on average 29 fewer minutes per day doing activities out of their houses in 2019 than they did in 2003, and a whopping 53 minutes fewer in 2023 than in 2019. “Americans are staying home to a startling degree,” they wrote in an academic paper.
Brian LeBlanc, an economist at PNC Bank, said the bank’s customers have been swiping their cards slightly less often to buy concert and sports tickets, and slightly more often at craft stores and streaming services, purchases that imply they’re spending more time at home. The people cutting back the most on their out-of-the-house spending are members of Gen Z, who normally spend the largest portion of their income going out but are also least likely to be able to afford it now.
Older generations are still buying the pricey tickets. The venues, LeBlanc said, “are able to increase prices, to a large extent, because there is a lot of demand still out there. They’re not targeting concert tickets, for example, for the entirety of the distribution of income. They’re targeting those upper-middle-class folks who still have substantial cash in the bank.”
Giving a $500 concert ticket as an example, LeBlanc said: “That works if you’re an upper-middle-income household buying for your kids. That works less if you’re a 23-year-old intern.” But the sector is still thriving thanks to rich people who can afford to pay.
Some young people, of course, are making it work. Katia Savelyev, a 24-year-old server in Chicago, budgets for entertainment to be a major part of her life. She flies to out-of-town concerts and spends $30 a month for a subscription that lets her see up to four movies a week at AMC theaters.
“With the state of the world, you’ve got to try and find joy wherever you can,” she said. “And if that’s going out, or going to a show, or something like that, you’ve got to do it.”
The post How the surging cost of going out is changing American life appeared first on Washington Post.
