Day: October 20, 2025

• High prices are eating into workers’ paychecks as costs jump 23% year-over-year, a new report found.
• Between groceries and eating out, employees spend an average of $108.68 each week on work lunches.
• Nearly 1 in 5 workers intentionally skip meals to save money, the report by ezCater found.

Inflation isn’t just driving up the cost of rent and groceries — it’s coming for your lunch break, too.

New data from ezCater shows employees are spending more than $108 a week on work lunches, up sharply from $88 last year. And as costs climb, a growing number of workers say they’re skipping meals entirely to save money.

The report, based on the results of an online survey conducted in June 2025 among 1,000 full-time US employees in on-site or hybrid roles, found that, on average, employees buy lunch 2.6 times each week, spending around $34.82 a week buying lunch out — up 26% compared to last year.

Those increasing costs are then driving more employees, mostly millennials and Gen Z, to skip lunch entirely, which reduces productivity and increases work stress.

Business Insider previously reported that skipping lunch can harm a worker’s mental, physical, and social health.

“Our data shows that hangry workers are bad for business: 43% take longer to complete tasks, 38% report being blunt with colleagues, and 25% avoid interacting with their peers,” Robert Kaskel, VP of People at ezCater, said of the report’s findings.

The ezCater report found that not only are younger workers more inclined to skip lunch, they’re also more likely to feel guilty about taking a lunch break at all. Gen Z employees in particular are 110% more likely than their older colleagues to believe their boss will frown on them taking a break, the report found.

Business Insider has previously reported that Gen Z employees are more likely than their older colleagues to feel anxiety at work.

“When your youngest employees feel guilty about taking their lunch break, it’s a big red flag,” Kaskel said. “Pair this lunch guilt with employees’ tendency to skip lunch for short-term productivity gains, and business leaders have a performance and burnout issue on their hands.”

A 2021 study published in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Research International found that a regular, one-hour lunch break plays a role in preventing absenteeism and improving employees’ job satisfaction and attitudes toward work.

In the “hardcore” work era, skipping lunch may seem like a win for efficiency, but a workforce running on empty can’t stay productive for long.

If lunch has become a luxury, it’s one the modern workplace can’t afford to lose.

• Gabriela Flax, a career coach, shares how to strategically talk about AI in job interviews.
• Flax says the three ways to partner with AI at work are amplify, automate, and architect.
• She says to treat interviews like a brainstorming session and come prepared with AI solutions.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Gabriela Flax, a 30-year-old career coach based in Sydney. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

The future of work isn’t humans versus AI: it’s who knows how to partner with it.

In the past two months, I’ve had several job-seeking clients go through interviews, and the majority of them were asked about how they leverage AI or what AI looks like in their job. So if you’re a job seeker who can’t answer that question, you’re already on the back foot.

Since leaving my tech career two years ago to become a full-time career coach, I’ve noticed that job seekers often go wrong by leaving AI out of the conversation during interviews. They don’t want to come across as lazy or replaceable, as if they’re outsourcing all their work.

But talking about how you use AI won’t make you look lazy. In fact, when done right, you’ll seem up to date on what tools exist and that you’re going to help that company get the job done better, faster, cheaper, or whatever the driving metric is.

I teach my clients 3 ways to ‘partner’ with AI. Here’s how to talk about each one in a job interview

Amplify: Discuss how you use AI to supercharge your natural strengths

Let’s say you’re a fantastic copywriter. You can amplify that skill with AI by uploading a PDF of all your existing writing to a chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude, and asking it to understand your voice. You can then use it as a tool to come up with content ideas or write outlines using your work as a reference.

The danger here is over-delegating to it. AI can hallucinate, meaning it’ll give you answers that sound polished but aren’t accurate. You still need to edit, fact-check, and make sure what it produces actually aligns with your intent.

Or, if you’re in a more analytical role, you can let AI crunch data so you can focus on interpreting the story it’s telling.

When you share this with an interviewer, you’re saying, “Hey, I’m already incredible at this thing, and here’s how I’m partnering with AI to be even more incredible.”

Automate: Share how you use AI to offload repetitive work

This might seem tedious, but I encourage my clients to track every little task they do for a week and use it to identify which tasks are repetitive or systematic and can be replaced by AI.

Most people can automate general actions such as scheduling meetings, prioritizing tasks, drafting emails, and generating documents.

In a job interview, share how AI takes your grunt work and allows you to pour that time and energy into your human skills, such as empathy, strategy, and relationship-building.

Architect: Explain how you use AI to design entire systems

This is where I see clients get a little hesitant because they think they need to have a tech background or know how to code. To be clear, you don’t. I recommend vibe coding, which involves talking to an AI agent through its voice recording feature and having it build things for you. Take a series of tasks that are unique to your job and try building a lightweight automation.

For example, a growth marketer might juggle repetitive, daily tasks like content ideation, A/B testing, and stakeholder reporting. They can create a ChatGPT agent that’s connected to their Google Drive and Notion, and instruct it to do the following tasks every morning: summarize yesterday’s campaign metrics into what’s working and what’s not, and send a short daily digest to the team. Your agent essentially acts as an assistant that never sleeps.

If you can come into an interview and explain to a potential employer that you’ve architected an entire system to achieve XYZ faster or cheaper, you will stand out.

Job interviews are opportunities to brainstorm with the interviewer

A mindset shift that I teach my clients is that you’re not at a job interview to be interviewed; you’re there to be a brainstorming partner. Think about it as you’re meeting with your future boss or coworker to have a conversation with them about solving a common goal.

Look through the job description, the company website, and even the company’s social media profiles to find out what that company is going through right now and what problems they might be experiencing.

Come into that interview with a few ideas on how you’d solve it, including AI tools that could help them or AI systems to implement.

You can even say, “These are the things that I’m experimenting with to help us do the job better. If I were on your team starting next week, I’d love to train coworkers on how to use it.” You’re demonstrating that you’re trying to advance the entirety of the team, not just yourself.

This is going to massively differentiate you from someone who’s exclusively regurgitating information from their résumé.

Show your curiosity about how AI is changing the workplace

AI is advancing rapidly, so it’s essential to not only showcase the tools you have now but also demonstrate your aptitude for learning and staying up-to-date with AI advancements.

Share how you’re looking forward to experimenting with AI to do this job even better.

During an interview, you might share the newsletters or threads you follow to stay up to date on the evolution of AI within your field. I’d argue that so much of successfully interviewing comes down to you being a proactive candidate, not a reactive one.

Do you have a story to share about how AI has transformed your career? If so, please email the reporter at tmartinelli@businessinsider.com.