The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets | Hacker News Reader

The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets

thehustle.co

318 pointsAnon84268 comments

One nice thing about buffets—all-you-can-eat or not—is that, if you want, you can eat small portions of a wide variety of things, rather than large portions of a small number of dishes.

The economics of a buffet are the only reason this is really possible; it’s not like you could place an order for e.g. “five breaded shrimp, three grams of braised pork, two wontons’ worth of wonton soup, ...” from a Chinese restaurant. You could only order each of these in larger amounts, because there are fixed costs to making a dish.

Agreed. A friend recently had his 40th at a nice Thai restaurant and had a buffet instead of individual orders. More expensive but there was something for everyone and I got to sample everything.

The local casino/racetrack also had a really nice all you can eat that I'd go to with friends and family just to have dinner. The variety was amazing with Asian, seafood, meats, Italian, Indian, etc. But it didn't turn a profit and closed within a few years. They had the crowds but the cost of food + the number of employees needed to serve it all was immense vs making a few grand a day from a few hundred people. Shame because I loved that buffet.

I used to enjoy the local Chinese all you can eat buffets but the quality became subpar. I visited one not far from me that I haven't been to in a good two decades and I was astonished to see the interior was exactly the same 90's chain restaurant decor down to the worn red plastic "glasses". It felt grimy and dirty and they were clearly not turning a good profit as their awning was tattered in places. It closed down last year.

> it’s not like you could place an order for e.g. “five breaded shrimp, three grams of braised pork, two wontons’ worth of wonton soup, ...” from a Chinese restaurant. You could only order each of these in larger amounts, because there are fixed costs to making a dish.

This seems to work at dim sum places, maybe because most dim sum seem to be portioned into, and then steamed, in small bamboo baskets.

Dim sum restaurants can do this well because they can crank them out in volume. A stack of 4 piece dishes gets snapped up quickly as the cart makes its way through the floor. It's also why the larger dim sum palaces are usually so much better than smaller a-la-carte restaurants.

The other nice thing is if you're on some unconventional diet (keto, vegan, kosher, etc), you can pick whatever fits your belief system that day.

This. I grew up as a Seventh-day Adventist, and buffets were a frequent dining choice for my family— only because it was possible to have a good lunch without any meat, and with as much dessert as one wanted.

I've never been a Seventh-day Adventist, but I've spent a significant amount of time around Seventh-day Adventists and attended their potlatches. For the sake of avoiding confusion for other readers I'll throw out that while vegetarianism and veganism seemed way more prevalent in that church than in the general population, neither is a universal practice within SDA. I have no idea what the numbers are, just that meat was an option at the potlatches I attended (as were many vegan and vegetarian dishes).

There’s definitely a range. I was a 4th generation SDA on both sides of the family - both of which were pretty strictly observant, though my parents were a little less so. Meat was absolutely off the table (haha). And I don’t know if we ever went to an SDA function where it was. Perhaps that has changed since we left 20 years ago.

Buffets were really a big part of Sabbath afternoons for many of my childhood years, and we knew many other SDAs for whom it was the same. The local SDA hospital still has a Hometown Buffet nearby that hasn’t been closed yet.

(We were non-strict enough to allow paying for something on Sabbath — though that would have crossed the line for many people we knew.)

I wouldn't be so sure about keto. Buffet restaurants rely on serving cheap ingredients, which essentially means carbohydrates.

Crab legs and beef with broccoli come to mind.

That sauce is loaded with sugar and corn starch.

Crab legs is still pretty good. You're generally right though.

Are crab legs at buffets realy crab? Surely passing off surimi as crab would be more cost-effective.

Pretty difficult to pass that off as crab, if they come still in the shell, like I've seen at every buffet I've been to.

Granted, I haven't been to a buffet in over a decade. They seem to have died out entirely near me.

Hmm, buffet restaurants in the UK must be a bit different to those in the US - here in the UK we only really have cheap Chinese and Indian themed buffets (exclusively with poor quality, sugar laden food), and you'd certainly never never find crab in them.

It's pretty easy to get a selection of vegetables and chicken breast. Stay away from things like meatloaf which might be padded with bread.

Everyone's first thought about keto is all meat, but vegetables are (or should be) a huge part of it. It's just a cool benefit that a night of brisket doesn't knock you off your diet.

If by “knock you off your diet” you mean “knock you out of ketosis”, then eating enough protein will do that.

I experimented with a keto diet for a neurological condition. I invested in some blood ketone measuring strips and was surprised how difficult it was to stay in ketosis. Anything more than a medium chicken breast in one meal does it for me. Other metabolisms may be different.

Buffets are terrible places to eat for a vegan or even vegetarian. Options are typically limited to simple salads, various types of potato (fried, baked) and occasionally pizza or pasta: i.e. cheap tasteless carbs.

Besides limited variety, the other problem is you need to choose very conservatively. Lots of options have animal-derived ingredients and the staff are either clueless or there exists commonly a significant language barrier.

Exception: Indian buffets. Almost always, veg items are kept separate from non-veg, and of that, what's vegan is usually easy enough to discern (or ask about), the two major ingredients to avoid being ghee and paneer.

Indian buffets are wonderful for vegetarians, they're a nightmare for vegans since American-Indian resturant cooking is loaded with every kind of dairy imaginable: yogurt, butter, ghee, and cream is in everything. Like you can't even have the naan at most places.

I will say it's an improvement on most restaurants simply because you can actually find naturally vegan options that aren't a sad salad but its tough otherwise since every place is different and uses wildly different recipes for a given dish.

The buffet we go to most often is Sweet Tomatoes. Not all vegetarian, but most dishes are. In fact, the only way to get much in the way of meat there is to go fishing in the chicken noodle soup tureen.

I organise some tech conferences. We tend to hold our speakers dinner at an upmarket all-you-can-eat buffet, mainly because we have a mix of adventurous and not-so-adventurous eaters.

We try to let our speakers and guests have an opportunity to try our local cuisine, but I'm starting to think that buffets aren't that great for doing so. Travellers new to a country/region wouldn't know what to take, unless there's a local by their side explaining the dishes to them.

As the person that foots the bill, I also usually observe how much everyone consumes — it's usually 2-3 small plates worth; probably valued at a quarter of what we're paying per head.

Really? I figure most people just take a little bit of everything the first round to figure out what they liked and then come back for more.

yeah, I find buffets are ideal for sampling lots of unfamiliar foods. I'm a lot more willing to try a small portion of something new than to actually order it as an entree.

now as far as value for your money goes, you probably don't come out ahead at an all-you-can eat buffet unless you bring a solid appetite with you. it's possible in GP's case that the cuisine of the restaurant itself is just too unfamiliar. the pickier attendees might not find anything they like. it's also possible that they don't want to be seen gorging themselves at a professional event where they are meeting a lot of people for the first time.

> it's also possible that they don't want to be seen gorging themselves at a professional event where they are meeting a lot of people for the first time.

Personally, I'd be less concerned about being seen as gorging myself in a such a situation, and more concerned with whether or not the unfamiliar food was going to leave me with unexpected digestive issues.

People I don't know, in a place I'm unfamiliar with, eating food I'm not familiar with sounds like a great recipe for caution.

> I'd be less concerned about being seen as gorging myself in a such a situation, and more concerned with whether or not the unfamiliar food was going to leave me with unexpected digestive issues.

I've heard something similar from other speakers, and it's likely we'll take steps to shift the food exploration to after the event is over.

As a paid speaker who goes to a lot of conferences, I always eat way less than if I’m out at a social gathering.

Partly it’s the professionalism - even in these mixer situations, I’m at work and with a client that’s paying a (comparatively) lot of money for me, and demonstrating my ability to down eight plates then back up for dessert isn’t great brand positioning.

There’s also the volume of food at conferences. If I don’t skip a few meals and eat smaller portions at the others, I could end up having a days worth of calories for all 3 meals, plus snacks, for up to a full week including travel.

One of the big changes I’ve made the past few years to my benefit is that, at conferences, I started making a point of not eating, especially mediocre food, at events just because it’s available for “free.” I basically never eat 3 meals a day and if I try to I start feeling really bloated.

I also avoid 3 meals a day - totally unnecessary in my case.

Alas, whether it was my upbringing or boarding school, I’m also a turkey-cum-labrador when it comes to free food and booze: I really, really struggle to stop eating. I can resist everything except temptation and all that.

I've got to shill for yet another all you can eat Polish buffet in Chicagoland that has been open for 40+ years. Warsaw Inn. That buffet is really amazing. So good! Go there. Eat all the different kinds of pierogies.

But also, they mostly just serve polish food, and I don't remember much if any seafood around either. It seems like for different types of buffets you'd have different food costs. Like a sushi buffet probably takes more than a taco buffet.

But the article says they think delivery food options killed the buffet. I'm not so sure, I think fast casual chains were around a lot earlier and did a lot of damage. You had the same labor savings with not needing dedicated wait-staff, and you could get a lot of people through the doors. While you can't cook in huge quantities, I'm sure they do a huge amount of all the prep in batches, which is how they can get the food out relatively quickly.

LOL that place is so far South you might as well call it an "Indianapolisland" restaurant.

But 3 Floyd’s is right next store to pickup a six pack :)

I’m coming to a Beazley course in Andersonville this spring. Any good polish restaurants to suggest in the area?

Thanks. I’ve been looking for a good Polish buffet ever since Bobak’s closed.

I'm still at awe of the Sushi Buffet thing that you can see all around in Helsinki, Finland. So far I have not seen anything like it, anywhere else in the world.

Usually the price you pay is 10€ for an unrestricted and no time limit access to eating sushi.

And the sushi is incredibly okay! It's nothing compared to stuff you find Tokyo ofcourse, but the price for quality is literally unbeatable.

And all this is happening in a city where restaurant prices for main dish are usually around 18-20€.

What am I missing?

Perhaps the restaurant uses a lot more rice for the rolls and the nigiris, or offer to fill up patrons with green tea or miso soup. Or, they are constantly busy and make their margins by the sheer number of patrons coming in for the incredible deal!

There are also quite a few all-you-can-eat-sushi buffet places in Turku, all with the same price of around 10€ during lunchhours.

A interesting part that was left out from the initial post is that we have these "lunch coupons" in Finland. AFAIK most employers provide these for their employees either as part of the total compensation or allow the employees to buy them tax free. The idea is basically that you get lunch for the coupon, the max valued coupon is currently worth 10,70€. Seeing how more or less all restaurants that serves lunch accepts these coupons I don't think it is possible to charge much more than the max valued coupon.

In Helsinki, most good lunches are more than the 10.80€ maximum. Everyone is paying the overage of 0.5-1€ with their card. For people unfamiliar with the system, the lunch coupons you use are deducted from your salary pre-tax, so it's significantly cheaper.

Been wondering the same of how its possible. Wish they could also do it across the bay in Tallinn.

Just take the subway across the bay in 2040.

Reconstituted fish product (Surimi). You probably ate a ton of it.

BTW, its really bad for the environment because it encourages overfishing.

I’ve been to a few sushi buffets in Helsinki and I can guarantee it wasn’t surimi after googling to see what that would look like. It was almost entirely salmon and tuna.

That may be the case and I don't doubt your view, but you'd be surprised at how good the Surimi manufacturers are at producing "sushi analogs" these days ..

I assume crab rolls are a good target for that stuff?

Indeed.

I doubt surimi can ever approximate a slice of tuna or salmon, even if it's hidden in a maki roll.

California roll 'crab' yes.

The largest expense if probably seating and serving you, not the food.

Also what I was thinking. Their minimum wage is double the US and even fast food is quite a bit more expensive there.

On the other hand they must be getting fish dirt cheap. I have heard even the youth hostels serve entire salmon for breakfast.

Yeah I'm leaning on that hypothesis quite a bit. Low amount of staff, high turnover for customers. Also I see they are doing something the autoamtion of making nigri rice piecies as well.

"What am I missing?"

I have been to a few all-you-can-eat sushi restaurants and the catch at all of them was: it is only Nigiri (not sashimi) and you have to eat the rice.

I can't remember if they simply refused additional servings until the rice was gone or if they charged a la carte for un-eaten rice portions, but one way or another, the goal was you had to fill up on rice ...

Well the word "sushi" actually means the kind of rice they use. It isn't exactly fair to call it a catch since that's the dish. And at the all-you-can-eat sushi chains in California I've been to, it is always against the rules to remove the rice. In fact that seems like a common rule at all asian buffets I go to.

If they start making the fish super-thin that's quite lame though. A buffet chain near me did that as they were trying, unsuccessfully, to survive. I also once went to a regular sushi places that had an all-you-can-eat special and who kept ("oopsie") accidentally bringing way more california rolls than I ordered.

I'll leave this here and step away 'cause I am supposed to be on a diet. Buffet in Mumbai https://youtu.be/kUosDBUjq5A?t=67

You might like this place in SF:

https://www.tajcamptonplace.com/dining/

There's a good one in north Atlanta whose name I cannot remember. But it's much more than 10€.

There used to be an all you can eat sushi place here when I was a kid, it didn't last too long, only a few months, but they had all you can eat 'craft your own' sushi, you could choose they type and filling and they'd make it for you, they had a BBQ grill at each table you could get pieces of meat for, they had a noodle bar with a bunch of different noodles and broths, a rice bar with a bunch of different kinds of rice, meat and vegetables for the noodles and rice, and a grill you could get freshly fried up meats and vegetables, all you can eat for everything with no limits for $20 Canadian circa late 90's/early 2000's.

My dad took us there a few times, he still talks about it and how sad he was when it closed down. He figures it just wasn't economically feasible. You got ridiculous amounts of really good, fresh food for fairly cheap. Far cheaper than ordering individually. We usually ended up eating until we all felt sick.

In Chicago I highly recommend Sushi Tokoro, it has everything you want from a sushi buffet: Great taste, reasonable price, and no food poisoning.

In Helsinki and in Finland more generally, the owners of all-you-can eat Asian buffets are not paying their workers anything close to a normal local wage. The workers are either family members of the owners, or people from the same close-knit region, or even trafficked labour, and they work for a pittance. Since cost of labour is a key reason for high prices in Finnish restaurants, it is no surprise that the Asian buffets are able to offer more food for less money.

Yeah I suspected this as a possibility, but do you have some kind of hard evidence on it? I do remember the case with the Nepalese restaurants last year tho, it was similar.

However, I would like to point out that this is a global phenomenon and I'd bet Finland has some of the least bad cases in this. Compare to some places like London where food is cheaper than Helsinki, but average salaries are higher. It's definitely about skirting regulations.

The other technique not mentioned here is for buffets to just stop refilling the higher cost items on the buffet if a group of big eaters comes in. then let them sit empty while the diners fill up on potatoes or what not, before finally refilling them.

Usually, they refill all you ask for.

Another trick is to keep drinks topped off. Fills you up.

Adding more salt to the food helps this path, but maybe I’ve just been too cynical and that day’s kitchen staff too heavy handed.

Salt makes food tastier and motivates you take another bite, which continues the cycle, so it's a good choice to put in the cheaper food by calorie/mass/volume/whatever-creates-satiety.

"By 2030, the National Restaurant Association projects that 80% of all restaurant items will be eaten at home..."

I doubt it. I'm not convinced that any of the delivery app companies are really making money; by 2030 they may not exist any more.

I mean delivery has always been a thing. Before the delivery-app-err it was maybe mostly pizza, but I don't see why delivery in general can't still be a major thing.

Also take out is always an option!

It was never 80% of food though. It's not even really 80% today.

If VC funding were to dry up I'd imagine either the higher delivery fees or the higher order minimums of the past would come back, and then consumers would respond to prices and reduce ordering out.

No argument there.

This probably depends a lot on autonomous vehicles. Right now VC money is subsidizing deliveries, but that's mostly subsidizing the driver.

Especially for items like this, because if you take the driver out of the equation and create purpose-built autonomous vehicles that aren't intended to have human occupants, they can be much smaller and don't have to worry about passenger safety. You could have autonomous electric vehicles the size of RC cars delivering takeout to your door.

Right. There's a startup which uses cute small robots to deliver food in Berkeley right now [1]. There are still a lot of humans in the loop - handling the actual pickup, remote-controlling the robots from Columbia - but even so that could save money compared to having a local driver in a car to make the whole delivery.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Kiwibots-win-fa...

Interesting. What happens if someone attempts to rob the robot?

Presumably the same thing that happens in most normal robberies; the robber gets the item but gets reported to the police. Presumably the delivery robots have cameras, making it easier to identify the criminal.

it's pretty hard to make delivery work if you (the business) have to pay the delivery person yourself. the key issue is that one person just can't deliver that many orders in an hour. food has to be sent out soon after it is made so it doesn't get cold (although you can do some amount of staging by keeping it on top of an oven). once the food is in the car, you have an even harder time constraint to have it still be hot when it's delivered. this means the delivery person can only carry a limited number of orders and will need to circle back to home base fairly often. basically you have a spinning hard drive trying to fulfill random, low queue depth io requests while maintaining low latency. it doesn't work well. even if you pay the person minimum wage, it's hard enough to break even during peak hours (the profit on an order is already low). it's really hard not to lose money on the driver off-peak.

the way your typical pizza delivery place makes this work is by skimping on the ingredients big time, then charging the same amount as nearby takeout places plus a delivery fee. you may have noticed that takeout-only places tend to be a lot better for the same price.

now you might ask why restaurants can't just make good food and charge enough so that they actually make money on delivery. unfortunately, most hot food really suffers from being crammed into a little box for 15-20 minutes until it gets to your home. it ends up being closer to reheated leftovers than freshly made food. this tends to create a ceiling for how much money most people are actually willing to pay for takeout/delivery.

source: worked in a takeout place and asked the owners of several of my favorite pizza places why they don't offer delivery.

Here in the UK, delivery was standard well before apps—almost every local take-away offered delivery if you phoned up and ordered.

Maybe just because the UK is smaller and so they need to cover less distance? I often see people talking about grocery delivery the same way, when all the major supermarkets have been doing it as standard here in the UK for years.

it could be that the UK is mostly dense enough. there are a few very dense parts of the US where you've been able to get pretty much anything delivered (eg, NYC) for a long time.

I don't know much about grocery delivery, but I can think of two reasons offhand why it would be more viable. the first is that the delivery window for groceries is much more forgiving. if you have a cooler, you can keep refrigerated/frozen items at the correct temperature indefinitely. this allows you to load a lot more stuff in the vehicle and plan a more efficient route. the second is just a guess, but I'd bet the typical grocery order is larger than a typical food delivery order, so you make more money per stop.

Certainly delivery was commonplace in the UK by the late 90s. It was unusual in the late 80s. Douglas Adam's first Dirk Gently novel (1987) has an American character who complains frequently about the lack of delivery pizza in London.

Yes, many delivery apps may close down. But I think 80% number will prove to be correct. What many miss is that huge number of meals served at restaurant are not leisurely dinners. A large number of eaters just want a meal with minimum fuss because they don't have 1) time 2) kitchen 3) skill or desire to cook.

It will be different from normal restaurant delivery in some ways. As 'cloud' kitchens can analyze large data sets on what gets ordered in a neighborhood on a particular night and prepare it in bulk further driving down cost leading to more deliveries.

Maybe in the USA. I doubt that will be true in Japan and other places that value the social aspect of eating out often.

I'm not convinced by this trend either. Everyone who's gotten delivery has had food that doesn't travel and feels like they paid more for a worse quality product.

I hope that eat at restaurants will have a renaissance. It's nice to eat out, be in a different space than your home, etc...

The only thing I found more interesting than all-you-can-eat buffets actually turning a profit is that there are business people who are apparently content running a business with such slim margins.

This article quotes a 5% margin. I know food industry margins are low in the first place, but as a business owner in a different field I'm left wondering why anyone would even bother. The same business prowess and attention to detail you need to make a buffett run profitably could get you very far in another industry.

> The only thing I found more interesting than all-you-can-eat buffets actually turning a profit is that there are business people who are apparently content running a business with such slim margins.

> This article quotes a 5% margin. I know food industry margins are low in the first place, but as a business owner in a different field I'm left wondering why anyone would even bother. The same business prowess and attention to detail you need to make a buffett run profitably could get you very far in another industry.

This is because you are assuming entrepreneurs act only for the purpose of profit.

Entrepreneurs act for the same reason all people act: to achieve their desired ends. These ends are established based on emotional desires, which do not necessarily correlate with things like maximum ROI.

Most industries have low margins.

You can see net margins for US public companies here:

http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/...

The average is 7.7%

> there are business people who are apparently content running a business with such slim margins ... I'm left wondering why anyone would even bother

A percentage margin is expressed relative to the value of the sales.

Low margin on high value sales is as good as high margin on low value sales, in terms of how much money you make.

Low margin is only a problem in low value sales.

Why shouldn’t people running a business with extremely high value sales, due to low margins? I can’t see what you’d find that a bizarre thing to do?

I’d be happy making 5% if I was selling a jumbo jet a day, for example.

You can’t criticise just the margin in isolation like you’ve done.

My expectation would be that if you’re used to operating in a high margin business you have ample room for error or fluctuation in conditions.

In a low margin business, you don’t have such room for error, and you actually have to fluctuate with conditions. This isn’t a deal breaker: most business operate this way!

But it’s scary for someone looking in from a high margin business.

Some businesses are inherently more controllable: for example, you cant expect 5% accuracy on NASA building a telescope that has never been done before but you can expect +% accuracy on the price of commodity product

You might think that, but errors and fluctuations tend to routinely cause high margin businesses such as software to collapse in large numbers. Think of the dotcom bust. I suspect part of the problem is these businesses flourish when the conditions are easy, but many don't have the experience or exceptional margins to survive long enough to adapt when conditions change.

The dot com bust was negative margin businesses.

When I look at Uber I don't think anything has changed.

Perceived high-potential-margin businesses with lead time lead to speculative investment in low- (or negative-) margin businesses in the same field with perceived potential, which is sensitive to fluctuations in the broader investment climate (e.g., payoff timelines) or reassessment of profitability potential. That’s what the dotcom boom and bust were about.

The actual high-margin businesses wouldn't be taken out in the bust unless they were high margin only because they were selling into the boom.

"The actual high-margin businesses wouldn't be taken out in the bust unless they were high margin only because they were selling into the boom."

Exactly.

This is why the National Restaurant Association always lobbies furiously against minimum wage hikes - it will never destroy the restaurant industry but it sure as heck destroys actual restaurants.

Which seems absolutely crazy to me. I would have expected them to push for them harder than your typical org since such a sweeping change would affect everyone basically the same. Nobody would be immune from raising their prices and the value differential would nudge customers away from fast food.

I think it doesn't affect not-yet-open restaurants nearly as badly as existing restaurant owners. NRA doesn't represent the restaurant market as a whole it represents a % of restaurant owners that currently exist.

Restaurant workers are, of course, going to be fairly indifferent to restaurant bankruptcies especially if an existing restaurant is swiftly replaced by a new one that pays more.

We're talking about all-you-can-eat buffets. I don't think they're selling a jumbo-jets worth of food a day.

The size of the US restaurant industry revenue in 2019 is "projected to total $863 billion in 2019 and equal 4 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product." [1]. Compared to $467 billion for the global software industry [2], or $19.1 for the global music industry [3].

I think there is some money to be made selling food.

[1] https://restaurant.org/Downloads/PDFs/Research/SOI/restauran... [2] https://www.statista.com/forecasts/963597/software-revenue-i... [3] https://www.ifpi.org/news/IFPI-GLOBAL-MUSIC-REPORT-2019

Everyone has to eat -- multiple times a day, even.

I don't die if I miss out on the latest version of ServiceNow or Adobe. Or the new Taylor Swift album.

It’s also important to look at capital expenditure intensity. Spending $100k to make .01% could make sense but spending $1B to make .01% is much tougher, from an NPV perspective.

Isn't ROIC the more important variable? Let's say I want $100k of profit per year. With 5% margins, I need to do $2M of business. But that doesn't mean I need to pay for all the inventory I'm going to transact up front. I don't have to have $2M capital invested in the business.

I might even be post-paying for the inventory (net 30 terms, for example). I post-pay the labor as well. In this case, it's kind of meaningless how much the inventory that I'm turning over costs, given a fixed margin. What matters is how much capital I have invested in the business. It also matters how quickly I can adjust to changing market conditions. If I can respond to changing conditions instantly, it's impossible for me to lose money. In practice this is not possible because of leases and delivery schedules, though. That's where the risk comes from.

Of course, variability of demand is also an important factor. That's where the risk comes in, because there are fixed costs that don't vary with business.

I think the issue is that ROIC is harder to assess and harder to understand than a simple profit margin calculation. For reference, in it's heyday Windows-and-Office Microsoft had a 42% ROIC.

Yeah, ROIC is really tough to get right and be meaningful. NPV is less “right” but more accurate.

You're describing all high-capitalization industries: heavy manufacturing, utilities, etc.

There’s still a big spectrum. Then we can look at “tech” companies like Lime which end up being extremely capital intensive.

> You can’t criticise just the margin in isolation like you’ve done.

The article is specifically discussing all you can eat buffets. I don’t think they are selling jumbo jets at Old Country Buffet.

No, but they might be getting a lot of volume. 5% on 100 customers a day is different from 5% on 500.

>but as a business owner in a different field I'm left wondering why anyone would even bother.

Because they don't have a choice.

Or that they have specifically chosen that particular field. If your heart and skill set is being a chef, then the running a restaurant is going to be your path.

They have a choice.

An economic profit is defined as making enough profit (and intangible benefit) to not want to do something else.

For a small business owner it's "am I better off selling it off and getting a regular job?"

For a larger chain, it's "is there a more profitable line of business?"

> For a small business owner it's "am I better off selling it off and getting a regular job?"

There is a lot of ego in a decision like that. Easy economically, very very hard emotionally.

This makes the assumption there is some kind of high margin business they can readily enter, but just don't for some reason.

I'm pretty safe in assuming they either enter a new business or don't for some reason. The some reason would be that they aren't able to actually do it.

No one just goes out of business; read a story about a failing business and there will invariably be a series of attempts they made to rethink their operation, failed acquisitions, etc.

So there we have to go back to the original argument: do they have a choice? I'm claiming their choice is the strategy they employ, they don't have control over the outcome, obviously.

The only case where you don't have a choice is when there's a sudden shock to your business; new laws put in place or something like mesothelioma crushing Lloyds. I don't think this applies because the changes we're talking about here are not sudden at all.

It's also not an all or nothing affair: you don't have to completely shut down one operation to start doing something else.

But other corporations can gradually enter and exit different lines of business, and this happens all the time.

Restaurant chains are a confusing example since they're really a mess of franchises. Even there, the parent corporation can create new branding and restauarant layout and effectively move into a new line of business.

This may come as a shock but software is the exception. The vast majority of the business world operates this way.

The fun part comes when you realize that absent monopoly conditions this is the natural stable state of a mature market, and think about what the future of software might look like, and what the current public policy fights are about.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/052515/what-average...

This article claims that banks make 24%, and they are hardly a monopoly. It also claims the overall average is 8.5%.

I can't figure out where that article gets its numbers from or which banks it's referring to.

The industry standard measure for bank profitability is something called ROA, return on assets, and it's an extensively studied academic topic, with the general consensus that an ROA greater than 1% is pretty good.

https://greyhouse.weissratings.com/ROA-ROE-and-What-These-Ke...

https://www.fdic.gov/regulations/resources/cbi/report/cbi-ro...

I'm sure there are some large institutional players that do consistently better than 1%, maybe up around 5 or 7.

But a longstanding industry with a sustained 24% returns would... sustained compounding 24% a year seems like it would lead to weird results. Like if a bank had survived fifty years and had a few hundred million in assets it would now be responsible for the entirety of US GDP.

EDIT: I looked at BOA as a random test case - 2.1T in assets, 22B in income, seems to match the ~1% rule: https://ycharts.com/financials/BAC/income_statement/quarterl...

Assets aren’t revenue though; I don’t think profit margin and ROA are comparable.

The aren't, which is why you're advised to stay away from financial institutions as a beginning small investor. They require specialized evaluation techniques.

24% sounds very much like return on equity. While the 5% for the restaurant are somewhat likely return on revenue.

Alright, yeah, I pulled up basic formulas on profitability ratios to check my math: https://thismatter.com/money/stocks/valuation/profitability-...

I've talked myself into: maybe 24% is technically "profit margin," but only because banks are weird and profit margin makes no sense for them.

If you have a grocery store and you sell $100 of fruit, maybe $1 is profit. It makes sense to say you have a 1% return on investment. $1 Profit / $100 revenue.

That makes sense.

But a bank loans out $100 at 5% interest. It collects $5 next year while the loan is still outstanding, of which $4 go to operating expenses.

That is $1 profit on $5 of revenue, so 20% profit margin, by the formula. But it took $100 to get you there, just like the grocer, so 20% feels inflated for basically the same result. (In other industries you don't sell a peach only for the buyer to later give you a new peach back, so that throws all of this off.)

(You raised ROE, which I think typically ROE for banks is 5-8%, and it's really dependent on random factors like how they treat shareholders, so you might be right? But I think we can set that aside too.)

So none of this makes sense and maybe I give up?

I can see why the industry just decided ROA is the measure here. It's not completely crazy, and seems to generate reasonable results relative to other industries.

And if we're really asking, "hey, I have $100, maybe was loaned it by a lender or depositors, and I can magically run a buffet or a bank next year, what do I expect to earn?"

Then yeah, we really want to be comparing the profit margin of the buffet to the ROA of the bank, as incommensurable as those sound. Maybe this isn't completely crazy and the industry lit has this already figured out in the most reasonable way.

> If you have a grocery store and you sell $100 of fruit, maybe $1 is profit. It makes sense to say you have a 1% return on investment.

Return on investment is something else. A grocery store will have sales well above the invested capital. The profit margin may be low-single-digit while ROI is double-digit.

Good catch, most sources and the link I included hold ROI as equivalent to ROA, and distinguish it from profit margin.

I was trying to shift to a lay voice in that bit and in the process totally misused one of the terms of art under discussion, was a bad oversight on my part.

I think my general explanation stands as to why we might want to shift between ROA/ROI and profit margin when comparing different industries though.

There are less than 5000 commercial banks in the united states and it is very rare a new one is approved. They've been consolidating and the total number declining for decades. Banking isn't a monopoly but it is a very limited, exclusive, club for those with lots of assets.

After all, if you're a bank you can create new money supply out of thin air by lending out money you don't have (fractional reserve). A money printing machine is a very valuable business. Every other service a bank provides is just icing on top of this.

Fractional reserve is lending out money people give the bank. it's not free money for the bank; the credit is balanced by a debt. You can do the same thing if you convince people to leave stuff at your house and then you rent it out.

Heck, every lessee on Airbnb is doing this.

As is everyone who has a mortgage and an investment account.

A bank can lend out more than the total deposits they have under fractional reserve banking. This is literally creating new money.

Yep. The majority of the M0 money supply is created through fractional reserve banking as debt.

Software is not really an industry though, it’s just sometimes grouped that way because it’s relatively new. The thing that makes margins low in general is commoditization and the relatively high COGS of physical materials and manufacturing costs. In pure software plays COGS is generally extremely low so there is no cost floor (hence freemium), but also the product can be literally any conceivable logic or data processing which means it can only be commoditized along more specific market lines.

Consider for example the forces driving Uber/Lyft margins vs Google/Facebook margins.

This is the same reason that ILM/Lucas expanded to Asia...

A quote from Lucas at the time they were looking to build Singapore was "Why should I pay some prima donna animator in the US $80k when we can get several in Asia for that price with no complaints"

Yes, this was actually said by an exec at Lucas...

I think the average margin might be misleading. After all, most restaurants fail pretty quickly. That number could be skewed by the unsuccessful businesses.

But I think it’s an interesting point. Why fight all day long for a 5% margin when you could put your money in index funds?

They might not have enough money to just put it in index funds and live off the dividends. So they have to work, and the business pays their wages

Because a 5% margin doesn't translate to a 5% annual return on investment.

Also at many small restaurants the owner and the owner's family is also working full time, and that 5% margin doesn't include their salaries.

> that 5% margin doesn't include their salaries.

This is something that often seems lost in this discussion.

The profit margin is usually after the owners themselves have taken a salary. If they are paying for themselves appropriately, and the margin is 0%, this is often described as "making no money".

What's making no money here is the business as an entity, not the owner, despite the frequent rhetorical conflation of the two.

Payout of positive margins, if they exist, are often classified as "profit sharing" in the simplest of businesses, like sole proprietorships. In more complex large businesses, they become dividends or employee bonuses.

Most people can't afford to pay themselves nothing while running a business.

They might also be optimizing for taxes by heavily re-investing, charging personal stuff on the expense account (like car/gas/travel)... That makes it look like they are doing badly while they are doing okay.

This would be clearly visible to investors because the company is accumulating assets.

1. It's unlikely investors are looking into small lifestyle businesses.

2. The company isn't going to accumulate many assets if the owners are paying for gas, travel, food, and rapidly depreciating assets.

It's a 5% margin on the sales, not on the capital.

The least you can expect is that a business sale is much larger than the capital stopped at it. Otherwise it is in great trouble, even on high margin markets.

They're making that 5% margin on multiple seatings per day, rather than once per year.

It doesn't really make sense to compare things this way, they're so different. Better to do an income flow analysis. For a given amount in invested capital, how much profit will a profitable restaurant generate in a year vs the stock market. The restaurant is gonna come in way ahead, though of course it's a very active investment (a full time job plus some) vs the passive index fund investment.

the index fund can have a losing year, but you have better control and visibility of risks when you are running the business.

The two are orthogonal. The 5% here is on revenue. This would be like your salary. You can of course invest your savings in an index fund but you still want a salary to get more money into your investments.

>Why fight all day long for a 5% margin when you could put your money in index funds?

Are you serious? You're making such a critical mistake. The business owner isn't paying for the products. The customers are. Every time a customer spends $100 you get $5 in pure profit after paying all the salaries (including your own) and all other costs. The 5% margin is applied on the money your customer is spending, not your own money. If you have $100 and get a 10% ROI then you would have to wait a year to get $10. If you have 10 customers each paying $20 for the all you can eat buffet then you have $200 * 5% = $10 profit.

Let's assume you spent half a million on your fancy restaurant. How long does it take to pay that back? You don't pay it back from the profit. The cost has already been taken into account and therefore lowered the margin which means the margin clearly doesn't influence the ROI. The final profit is $1 per customer with 300 customers per day which translates to $75k of pure profit per year or a ROI of 15% in the first year. The real numbers probably look completely different. 300 customers is probably a below average day. The restaurant may be more expensive or cheaper to set up (especially if they are renting instead of owning).

I've seen some of my "cost plus fee" government contracts I've worked on in the past; the fee (profit) was only around ~3.5%.

Not saying this is a typical fee on government contracts, but the company I was working for (big dollar government contractor) was happy with that.

Sure but in that case the risk is small and the base is large.

If I recall correctly Walmart operates with low single digit margins for most goods. They make up for it with favorable vendor terms; I read that a can of green beans sold by WM will turn over 6 times before they have to pay the vendor for the first can.

> I read that a can of green beans sold by WM will turn over 6 times before they have to pay the vendor for the first can.

I can't parse this but am curious what it means; can someone explain?

I believe he is talking about payment terms like "net 30 days". A made up example: Walmart buys a can of beans and promised to pay the seller 30 days later. During those thirty days, they buy five or six more order of beans to make up for that first sale and the other ongoing sales, each payment being thirty days later. During each of those 30 day periods, that cash is sitting in Walmart's pocket for them to invest etc.

Thanks!

> The same business prowess and attention to detail you need to make a buffett run profitably could get you very far in another industry.

If you have the industry know-how, money and time to change industry, sure. In reality...

Someone posted that the average margin for a public company in the US is 7.7%.

There's an economic 'law' that basically states that the return on investment of a business in a mature market (read perfectly competitive) will always trend towards the interest rate (plus the cost of whatever sort of barriers to entry are in place) because of the arbitrage principle. If a business makes higher margins, everyone will pile in and undercut the incumbents until the margins are reduced to the cost of entering the business.

For most sectors of the food industry, there's very little product differentiation. Some restaurants do make higher margins, but they're typically small and highly differentiated.

Restaurants, outside of fast food and other large chain operation, probably average below this for various reasons (churn being a big one). I've heard that 5% is a good target.

In fact I suspect you can reasonably look at large chain operations as figuring out a way to reduce the factors that keep the average return lower than it "ought" to be...

Nah 5% is shit (but also the average). I've been lucky to have been involved in some very profitable restaurants with margins more like 20%...

When you set out to do a business plan, you should be looking at differentiation. Not producing a commodity with slim margins...

  Nah 5% is shit (but also the average)

It can't really be both of those things. I'm sure there are outliers just like you describe, but not that many.

20% is pretty high margin in general for business.

You underestimate how hard it is to switch a field. If it takes $50k to switch I will get better margins but first I have to have $50k. Then how do I know that new thing I will do will bring that profit in first year? That is already $50k and lost profits for figuring out new market.

If you look at risks involved and potential loss of money instead of only looking at higher margins, it is easy to see why people would rather earn their 5%.

Depends on 5% of what. I’d be perfectly happy making 5% margin on say 10 million annual revenue.

The higher the margin the more inefficient the market.

I've seen a number of instances where "all-you-can-eat" rapidly devolves into "all-you-can-find" - where expensive items simply don't get refilled until the big eaters go away. We went to a Churrasco place one time with my startup team and the staff more or less spent half the allotted time essentially hiding from us. It was comical, but expensive.

The other aspect of buffets is that frequently the food is quite dreadful; they may have steak, but it's cheap cuts, cooked to the consistency of a Frisbee. Even if you're "beating the buffet" economically, you're just eating bad food for no reason.

The "better" all-you-can-eats are priced accordingly. The Bellagio in Las Vegas had a seafood thing that cost north of $40, if I remember correctly. The crab legs get constantly refilled, they also had giant prawns. This was years ago so it may not exist any longer. Founding Farmers in DC has a brunch thing, also expensive, but the lox tray is never empty. The surprise in the bill is the cost of drinks, espressos and mimosas add up quickly. I wonder if there's a different economic model for the more upscale all-you-can-eats. The food choices is more appealing all around.

Buffet style places are popular in singapore, but often cost around SGD100 per person.

you can get all you can eat crab legs in much cheaper chinese buffets in vegas outside the strip.

Brazilian steak houses are often buffets as well.

They often are because they want you to fill up on salad and so forth rather than just eat meat. (And, if they don't have a buffet, they bring plenty of that sort of thing around the table.)

I sorta like Brazilian steakhouses but I certainly don't get my money's worth because I don't have the appetite I used to have.

I'm not a huge carnivore so those guys will never get my money, heh. SO MUCH MEAT!! All in one meal! Today I split a 6 oz. steak with another person and it felt like a lot of meat.

This thread! All-you-can-eat as a hedging strategy is a bit unnerving, it's like a bet for my vice, that I'll come out ahead. Something like The Purge, all the crimes you can commit in 24hrs.

As of 2014 it existed.

The Red Apple, quoted in the story, closed their original location (that had been open for 30 years) last summer to make way for condos. At 5% margins it's pretty easy to see how a builder could make them a great or even life-changing offer.

The danger for consumers is assuming this is a zero-sum and that the converse economic goal applies to you (i.e. assuming that the consumer benefits by eating a lot or focusing on meat). I conjecture that after factoring in the economics of health and quality of life, the economic optimum for a typical buffet consumer is the same as for any other eater: to eat sparingly and in a balanced manner.

Buffets feel like an unbounded solution to optimizing for calories per dollar, which is a ridiculous thing to focus on as an overweight engineer!

Well, no? As stated in the article, the truffles and oysters were hidden. This is assumingly because people optimise for most expensive dishes.

If one would optimise for calories, she'd just take the cake and fatty meats (which are also usually cheaper meats).

Optimizing calories per dollar suggests hitting the cheap starch, which is even cheaper away from the buffet.

Optimizing expensive-food-per-dollar would hit the meats, rather than the highest-calorie options.

There is one other aspect about buffets: food is available quickly. This is primarily useful when traveling, if one wants to have warm food with significant cooked vegetable content (keeping in mind the aspects raised in other comment threads) without adding an hour or more to the trip.

I think you would want to eat nutritionally balanced, yes. But you would also want to eat the most calories possible that would stick with you long enough to skip followup meals and not exceed your ideal daily caloric intake.

I can skip breakfast and eat a really big late lunch and won't need any more food for the rest of the day until lunch the next day.

Yes,

To put it in game theory or economic terms, minimizing the buffer's utility function does not (necessarily) maximize your own utility function and vice-versa.

As a "game" the buffet has competitive and cooperative aspects - hiding some of the best stuff but still offering it to those who demand it.

I sometimes drink a stupid amount of diet soda. I know drinks are usually high margin, but I wouldn't be surprised if some places lose money on me. I went to a Denny's recently and tried to count the number of refills I got, but I lost count. This is the same Denny's I went to in college, where the waitress knew me. She'd drop two pitchers of Diet Coke on the table before she took my order.

The epitaph on my tomb stone should probably be "Didn't do an autopsy. We just assumed he was one giant tumor artificial sweetener induced cancer."

I know you are joking but artificial sweeteners do not cause cancer. Current literature does suggest they are bad for your teeth though.

I doubt it. The postmix box that they use costs cents(if that) per litre.

If the drink was $2 and served in glass, you'd have to have a 3-digit number of refills before they lost money on it, assuming they use a gun.

Including dishwasher and ice/refrigeration expenses?

All studies I've seen of artificial sweeteners have only shown that they are measurably worse for you than water. Sugar is worse than non-nutritive sweeteners

Similarly with MSG, studies show it is less toxic than salt. It is only 'toxic' in ridiculously large quantities.

There's studies suggesting artificial sweeteners aren't good for your gut microflora. I haven't heard anything beyond that.

I was (mostly) kidding about the epitaph. Healthcare Triage did a good video on the subject a few weeks ago.

https://youtu.be/cj6oO-O1QsM

If I'm not mistaken, margin is not just high, it's more like most of the price is margin. So I doubt anyone will go bankrupt because of your habit.

Oh and I quit, so you can be sure there's hope for you.

Just don't get sensitized to tartrazine (Yellow 5, present in caramel color).

>The big buffet chains that once dotted the Midwest have been hit the hardest: Old Country Buffet is down to 17 of its 350 original locations; HomeTown Buffet has closed 217 of its 250 eateries; Ryan’s Buffet has downsized from 400 to 16.

I am not surprised.

I went to an Old Country Buffet about two decades ago during the time I was working in a hospital kitchen. I recognized a lot of their dishes from work, they were serving the same lowest quality cheap food that we served to the patients.

Now Old Country Buffet has to compete with the variety of high-quality restaurants we have available today. Customer's tastes have changed and now eating a reasonable amount of higher quality food seems more desirable than eating unlimited hospital food.

There are high quality buffets thought, Indian buffets are the best thing ever. But the low quality ones are dying out.

Golden Corral has moved up to the midwest.

They've been there for some years (at least 10-15 in Indiana) - I lived there, though I think it has been at least 10 years since I've been there. I remember being somewhat disappointed the last few times and it was generally difficult to get beverage refills often enough. I'm not sure they are "quality".

The best I've had was an Indian buffet in Indiana and a hotel's breakfast buffet in Amsterdam. I woke up to eat breakfast there.

That’s what I noticed too, it’s like no one working there even tastes the food, it’s just not good. Definitely not woRuth the price when you can a good meal for the same money at a lot of places.

This article links to two (!) different Wansink studies.

For context: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/?s=brian+wansink

(he's a Cornell prof with dubious research/PR tactics)

You’re being kind — He’s a former Cornell Prof who was removed from his position for making up data to fit PR-able conclusions. None of his work should be cited as evidence of anything.

A quote from the Brian himself illustrating how he is able to "publish" so much junk research.

> P-hacking shouldn’t be confused with deep data dives – with figuring out why our results don’t look as perfect as we want. With field studies, hypotheses usually don’t “come out” on the first data run. But instead of dropping the study, a person contributes more to science by figuring out when the hypo worked and when it didn’t. This is Plan B. Perhaps your hypo worked during lunches but not dinners, or with small groups but not large groups. You don’t change your hypothesis, but you figure out where it worked and where it didn’t.

This is horrifically bad research practice and basically guarantees that all of your results will be completely p-hacked.

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2018/09/23/tweeking-b... is another hilarious example.

Really? Suppose you just ran a twenty year, many million dollar field study, the hypothesis was not confirmed, you just throw everything out & that's that?

No, you publish a negative result, which in many ways can be more or just as informative as a positive finding. See for instance https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1906848.

It's totally fair to do subgroup analysis, etc to try to better understand the data, but you have to keep in mind that you can't claim statistical significance on those without very careful control over researcher degrees of freedom and other related issues.

Yes because firstly, you didn't design the experiment for that reason, so you didn't consider what inadvertent biases you introduced for the "new" way of looking at the data. Plus on top of that, because of false positives, you're going to find a LOT of false positives by accident.

So every study "discovers" something new, but it's not because of biases and false positives.

I liked buffets a lot but in the last 15 years all but one buffet I liked to go to went dramatically downhill in quality. It is likely this was due to cost cutting measures to stay competitive. Eventually it got to where dishes and cutlery weren't even cleaned properly and I'd have to dig through a stack to find one without residue, and I was getting food poisoning about a quarter of the time. I simply had to stop going, they were bad, and unsafe. This is likely why there has been a mass purging of buffet chains nationally during this time period. It's not that the public has lost their interest in buffets, it's that people have noticed the quality is too low to be acceptable despite the price, which isn't a bargain anyway for any but those that game the system as is mentioned in the article, or for the ultimate in low cost places like all you can eat combination sushi-thai-vietnamese-mongolianBBQ-Chinese-italian-jello-mac'n'cheese lunch places only $4.99, or $3.99 if you use the pennysaver coupon.

Like the top comment mentions, some of us don't want to gorge ourselves, it's nice to have a variety of things to sample, but also buffets are useful for weekday lunch since you can be in and out with a full meal much faster than you can in a restaurant where you have to wait for your order.

One remaining buffet that's still good quality in my area is a certain classy Indian restaurant. They only do the buffet for lunch from 11-2, so it's impossible for people to come in and eat for 4 hours straight. Also there's almost no meat at all, so the restaurant doesn't appeal to those who come in to eat a pile of steaks. I've never seen anyone come and just eat plate after plate. People come because they can get good vegetarian food quickly for lunch.

High quality buffets will likely survive, but there's less of a market for them.

A successful hybrid model might be that of Olive Garden, which mixes reheated frozen food with unlimited breadsticks and salad, both which are extremely cheap to provide unlimited quantities of.

Makes me wonder how the "Paradox of Choice" works in this situation since the customer is already committed to purchasing. Does this lead to more-than-usual consumption (cf. the usual shying away from purchase in a Choice paradox scenario)

Isn't loss aversion more relevant to this? You already paid for all this, so you would "lose money" by not eating more.

You mean sunk cost?

Loss aversion from the buffet would depend on how much food is available, not how much you paid.

Sunk cost fits better. I think loss aversion is however also not a bad fit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Loss_aversion

One is: I already paid, therefore I should eat. The other is: I paid for infinity, therefore I should eat more.

>A German triathlete was asked to prematurely leave an $18.95 buffet after consuming 100 plates of sushi.

Gotta love this guy's confidence in the ability of the budget restaurant to procure and handle properly high quality fresh seafood

> Even higher-end buffets, like the $98 brunch at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, employ these tactics: “They hide the truffles, the foie gras, and the oysters,” says Britt. “You literally can’t find them.”

I honeymooned are The Del, and they kindly comped our brunch for our entire stay. This was for the downstairs brunch, which doesn’t have as much meat but is still amazing. It’s about $40/person these days, and considering all that it includes (made to order eggs, bacon, waffles, pancakes, pastries, fruit, desserts, and fresh squeezed juice), and the level of service, it’s a pretty good value.

While very occasionally a buffet can be fun, I usually consider them not so great an experience. Yes, it is nice to be able to decide yourself the relative composition of ingredients, like adding the extra piece of meat or a lot of your favorite vegetable, but too often you end out with a strange mix of stuff on your plate. A plate, which as described in the article, usually is to small of this. So while you might get a little bit more food, it is often less quality, than if you had ordered a prepared dish. And of course, many restaurants offer dishes which are smaller or lager.

> but too often you end out with a strange mix of stuff on your plate

Bingo. When presented with a buffet, people (myself included) usually have a fear of "missing out" the good stuff, so they just load a little bit of everything to their plate. At a buffet, you usually don't have the information about (1) how filling an individual ingredient is and (2) how well they go together. So each and every time, you end up with too much food which doesn't really combine. In the end, you leave too full and slightly unsatisfied. On a menu, the individual menus or plates have been tested for months against the cooks and guests, and the kitchen has adjusted plates which were always returned with leftovers to be smaller and/or removed meals that led to too much complaints

So basically, on a buffet you will get an untested meal designed by someone usually not competent enough to design it (you), every time.

And even if you had perfect knowledge and would combine an exact replica of what was on the standard menu the fact that it is a buffet means the food has been out for a while. It seldom will be as good of an experience as just ordering the same thing.

Which I sometimes do. At which point people will look at you funny.

But you can't in many places and unless everyone does the same (unlikely) you end up getting your food when everyone else is about done.

I'm generally not a fan of buffets.

Well my trick is to get a little bit of everything then return and just get what you liked the most and go crazy. Sometimes there's an issue with too many things to try, but usually it works. I always take all-you-can-eat literally.

I have the opposite opinion. I eat several times per week at self-service buffets (they're very common around here, though it's almost always paid per weight), and it's much better than traditional restaurants. Instead of a small selection of dishes you might not like (or have components you might not like; it's especially bad for non-meat-eaters, since usually only one or two of the choices are not meat), in a way too big portion, and taking a long time to get ready, you can choose only components you like, in the amount you want, and you don't have to wait. Yes, occasionally a traditional restaurant can be fun, and when you get lucky the quality of the food can be great, but I usually consider them not so great an experience.

I vehemently disagree, buffets are glorious experiences. It's everything that is great about the modern world in a single place. Sure a cohesive dining experience can be nice, but a buffet offers you the ability to have it all. To eat like a king, a little bit of this, and a little bit of that. Or heck, it can be a mound. If you've ever looked a menu, and had a moment of FOMO while making a decision, you should be able to appreciate the magic of the offers available in a buffet.

> strange mix of stuff on your plate

Common problem for beginners, but with experience you can avoid it using more advanced buffet technique and strategy.

One trick is to switch to a two-pass algorithm. Before you grab a plate, walk around the buffet area and look over people's shoulders, survey what's available, and make a mental note of which items you want most, which go together, and which will fit on your plate. Then grab a plate, get in line, and fill your plate without being blind to what's ahead of you.

You may mildly annoy the people whose shoulders you look over and your dining companions who have to wait on your slow process before they can begin eating, but it's a small price to pay for taking a buffet seriously.

Another trick is to look at what's on other people's plates, both people sitting at tables and people exiting the buffet line. You may notice a food on someone's plate that you didn't see on the buffet line. Maybe it wasn't easy to spot or maybe there was some other serving area (a dessert table off in a different corner) that you didn't notice.

I stopped going to all-you-can-eat buffets years ago for the simple reason that you don't stop eating when you're full - you stop eating when you hate yourself.

If the number of all-you-can-eat buffets drops, it's likely because society is starting to advocate healthier lifestyles in my opinion.

For the same reason there's certain foods that I almost never allow myself to buy at the grocery store (like Pirate's Booty) -- I will eat it until it's gone and then feel bad.

I probably go to an all-you-can-eat buffet once every couple years, and that's enough. Interestingly I'm not including Indian buffets or hotel breakfast buffets in that count; those don't trigger the same "you must eat everything in sight" urges for whatever reason.

I’ve started going more, but mostly to Brazilian steakhouses. You will stop eating steak exactly when you are satiated. I actually lose weight if I go a few days in a row.

Do you avoid the cheesy biscuits?

Pão de queijo, definitely not.

Brazilian here. I overeat at steakhouses just like anywhere else, and never heard the distinction before. Maybe it's just you?

Hell, I struggle with even normal restaurants. I like going out, my wife and I can afford it, but I feel like I'm going out for the freshly, crispy yummy food.. and yet, I always end up taking half of it home because they hand me a massive plate.

I'm thinking next time we go out we'll try and get the same thing and split a plate. .. and then tip as if we ordered 2 plates because I feel guilty to the server. Hah.

Haha, that's the strategy my wife and I use. If we know we want separate plates we'll just not eat earlier and/or bring a box home. Some of the portion sizes are literally more than a day's worth of food.

Can recommend, it works well. We use that strategy a lot, and pass the savings to the server.

The portion sizes at many restaurants is just ridiculous and results in a massive waste of food and an unhealthier population.

Reduce the portions, reduce the cost, reduce the waste, reduce negative health consequences.

> I'm thinking next time we go out we'll try and get the same thing and split a plate. .. and then tip as if we ordered 2 plates because I feel guilty to the server. Hah.

The server isn't the one making the food so no reason to feel guilty, splitting an entree is normal, but if you really want to help out the restaurant (assuming you do this often and at the same place) order more drinks from the bar or preferably a bottle of wine for the table.

That does more for the entire staff, than just the server who quite frankly earns way more than they provide to the operation.

I think the price point also matters. There's a vegan buffet 10 minutes from my house that gets a lot of visitors. I'll go there when I want to eat food but I don't necessarily have something specific in mind. I just serve myself a reasonable amount (less than a full plate) and once I'm done eating I'll go. I notice that a lot of other people do the same. They have free tea and water, so it's a quick process. The price point is probably 1.5x what you could get a satisfying lunch for from street vendors, but it's a nice environment and still cheap (about $1.37 usd, located in the capital of Vietnam).

It must be a combination of customs and the price point though. If they had a $5 buffet in the US I bet a lot of people would gorge out there, and I feel like if I went to a $50 buffet I'd also try to maximize the value of the food that I'd intake.

I mean hopefully most people think of going to a buffet as a "once or twice a year" thing and not something you do on a regular basis e.g. Bacchanal at Caesar's Palace in Vegas or a higher quality All You Can Eat Sushi place.

I'm okay with going all out on the good stuff at either.

> you don't stop eating when you're full - you stop eating when you hate yourself...

>>If the number of all-you-can-eat buffets drops, it's likely because society is starting to advocate healthier lifestyles in my opinion.

The last one I went to gave me a stark realization of what was taking place, I got there with 45 mins left as I was in the same shopping center going hard on upper body workouts at the gym in order to build an appetite and decided an afterwork out steam was a good idea. They were slow paced with anything but my drinks as I was sitting at the bar--which were really reasonable, $1 tea, $4 generic sake! So I ordered several of each.

My apps (veg and shrimp tempura) were most of my meal, it wasn't until the last 8 mins left for Lunch order that they dropped off another paper menu thing, but I saw the people left in the restaurant and they didn't look healthy at all. Most were obese and possibly diabetic, they had tons of sugary drinks all around them alcoholic and non alike.

I just ate like 10 pieces of nigiri (like 1/6 of the sushi I normally could put down at most ala-carte places if I'm really hungry) because I realized that this behaviour of excess is not sustainable let alone satisfying--I left oddly satiated after my tamago-yaki, regardless of the amount I ate.

Because as you said, most of the time you go to these places you eat until you have a sense of loathing about what you've done to yourself.

According to Drawdown, reducing food waste is the top individual action one can take to reduce one’s impact on climate change. Buffets tend to be quite wasteful and/or encourage serving older food a lot more than a la carte orders. There could be some exceptions, such as buffets in hotels where it’s included in the room rent and is a lot easier to plan for (the quantities) based on the number of guests and the guest demographics.

As a consumer, if you want value for money in a buffet, the best bets, IMO, are fresh foods and/or the ones that aren’t processed much. All the high sugar and high fat processed foods tend to be made with low quality ingredients while also being terrible for health. Also focus on enjoying the variety with smaller quantities of everything you’d like to eat rather than trying to eat a lot more than your usual appetite.

It's unclear to me why buffets would be more wasteful than other restaurants, particularly in climate change terms.

There's some contradiction in what you've said about minimising waste and demanding fresh foods. If we stick to only the freshest foods, then we waste a lot more.

Surely being able to serve in quantity creates positive economies of scale.

In my observation, buffet customers tend to attempt to eat a lot more by filling their plates with a lot more than they can handle. This is because they’ve already paid for it and believe that eating more is the way to get more value for money. Once they’re in the middle of the meal, they realize that they cannot finish it and that gets wasted. With a la carte, you’d at least have the option of taking the leftovers home.

Some places have a nominal "no leftovers" policy. I'm not sure if and how they enforce it, but the idea is that if there's something significant left on your plate, you should take it with you as you leave paying as if it were something you ordered from the menu.

Obesity has been linked to climate change in many studies. Here's a summary of one typical example:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/another-reason-to-combat-t...

People in developed countries eating more food than they need is very wasteful, not just in food production, but the extra fuel needed to transport these people, the extra material needed to clothe these people, etc.

Anybody who's overweight or obese can't be credible if they act concerned about climate change and won't do something as simple (and without cost) as eating less food.

> Anybody who's overweight or obese can't be credible if they act concerned about climate change and won't do something as simple (and without cost) as eating less food.

For one, I don't think it's "as simple", and for two, the pattern "if you don't do X, you're not serious/credible/honest/worthy" is unhelpful.

Would you be skeptical to what a billionaire CEO would have to say about Income Inequality? Or what a dairy farmer would say about Oat Milk?

Guess the owners would not appreciate the local Keto meetup having an event at their buffet.

Depends. There are enough cheap cuts for slow cooking - and you could always drawn your meats in sugary sauces anyway.

The labor advantages for buffet-style restaurants generalizes - you eliminate a lot of downtime due to timing variability when you switch from make-to-order to make-to-inventory, reducing labor costs significantly. You can get this without a buffet model in restaurants, most notably with the conveyor-belt sushi restaurants that charge per dish you take.

I saw a great solution to the over-eating problem in one sushi spot in Italy. Not exactly a buffer, but you could pay upfront and order as much as you want per person. The caveat is that you can only order four servings at once and you pay the full a'la carte price for everything you hadn't fully eaten.

This is the case with all you can eat sushi places in the US as well

then why not make multiple small trips?

They also serve a much higher ratio of rice to fish than a typical sushi restaurant

you pay the full a'la carte price for everything you hadn't fully eaten

I've heard of a game in university: two players take their meals in the cafeteria, the one with the more expensive lunch wins, the other one pays for both. Rules: you must eat everything and you take only one portion of anything (this is not a caviar-eating contest).

Interesting exercise, but why not just throw the uneaten food under the table, or covertly take it to the restroom and toss it in the toilet?

The purpose is to incentivize people to think twice about what they are ordering and how much they can eat, not to prevent people who are already intent on abusing the system. For that, you simply have to observe and ban people.

There's one Argentinian buffet in Madrid (in Plenilunio mall if someone is interested) with an unusual system: they bring the food around the tables and you pick what you want. Most of it is barbecued meat. I avoid going there because I can't help eating too much every time.

That's the typical way of barbecue restaurants in Brazil. We have it for barbecue, pizza, and japanese food actually.

It's actually less unusual than you would think, these are called churrascarias or Brazillian steakhouses.

Sounds like an Argentinian version of a Brazilian rodizio..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod%C3%ADzio

There's one of those in another corner of the mall, I should try one day. But are rodizios usually all-you-can-eat too?

Yes, rodízio is all you can eat but it’s not always the only option, you can often order a la carte off the menu as well.

sounds like the Brazilian rodizio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod%C3%ADzio

Buffets are making money on impatient customers who are piling up on fries and mac-n-cheese and other super cheap "fillers" and junk foods before discovering and allocating space for more delicious and expensive dishes that are typically placed at the far end of a food isles.

This way they compensate the losses caused by my visit. I don't touch any food until i do complete walkaround and learn about everything they have to offer.

Then i typically pigout on lobster legs, tenderloin cuts, fish-rich sushi and other high end proteins, carefully avoiding any cheaper "fillers". My visit to buffet would cost me the equivalent of ~$200 visit in a-la-carte restaurant.

I wonder if the growth of intermittent fasting is gonna reduce even further the number of all-you-can-eat buffets. Fast for an entire day (or 2 if you're feeling brave), then gorge yourself the next day at a buffet.

I remember a story from my dad that one of he and one of his friends use to eat at this one lunch time all you can eat buffet in the 80s. Unfortunately, one of his friends spoiled the deal by getting more to eat, he even asked the restaurant staff for a bigger spoon. In the end, they were banned (even though my dad I think had only two plates since he had a busy day ahead) from the restaurant.

There was an all you can eat sushi place, they charge you for the sushi that you couldn't finish. I thought that was a pretty good way to charge.

If I do go to a buffet I only eat protein because it seems to be the only way to get my money's worth.

If I go to a buffet I fill up my plate with all the food I most enjoy even if that includes the cheap stuff. Then I feel like I got my money's worth, even if they made a profit.

For some people, getting their money's worth (literally: the food they eat cost the restaurant almost as much, or more than, the amount the customer paid to eat it) is the enjoyment.

Several of my family members are this way.

Pretty sure that philosophy (sufficiently widespread) is what leads to the decline of societies.

A variation of that philosophy led to the end of a limited salad deal in China, supposedly patrons would stack their plates to an absurd height to get around the one plate limit. https://kotaku.com/how-chinese-ingenuity-destroyed-salad-bar...

back when i lived in the south, I would go to all you can eat chinese buffets and just eat crab legs. They even had scallops on their mongolian bar! They always lost money when I came in. These places are impossible to find and I don't think exist anymore for less than $20.

I’ve seen a couple in New Orleans but I don’t know if I would vouch for their quality

i'm not sure how you can get bad quality crab legs, they're all boiled and they look ok.

A friend of mine, not a native speaker, calls them "eat all you can" buffets.

To quote a well-known Dutch hotel/restaurant owner: "They'll eat me poor but drink me rich". The margin on the food may be thin, but drink margins are usually more like 75-100%.

I thought this was going to be about US healthcare.

Meanwhile in France...

https://www.lesgrandsbuffets.com/en

Buffets are great but there’s something off with the food at the all you can eat buffets with fixed price. Probably the food is of lesser quality..

I read this while at a buffet.

better get your money worth of steak

i wonder if you can ever just take the steam tray a la homer.

The trick is cheap food and tons of glutamate.

Why the glutamate? I find foods high to glutamate to make me want to eat more of them.

> Why the glutamate?

Because it's delicious.

now im hungry

Vegetarian on diet: I eat at Golden Corral, only salad, watermelon, cole slaw, stir fried veggies (lot's of red bell peppers and some fresh pineapple), little rice, unsweetened tea - - and I only go from 2 pm to 4 pm weekdays when the price as $8 or $9 for senior, no charge for drink. It's pure torture to stay away from the dessert bar.

I cannot buy that variety anywhere for that price.

The simple trick is you need to price it such that any combination will always cover the costs of the most expensive meal.

-Don't just downvote, explain why it won't work.

Because the difference between the average and the most expensive is so great, that people who eat the average meal aren't willing to pay enough to cover the most expensive.

That price is obviously too high. Congratulations, you have no customers now.

They mention Golden Corral. They save money, notoriously, by serving "Dumpster-Aged" ribs.