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Comment by lukev | Hacker News Reader

I love articles like this. I’d happily read a book with each chapter breaking down the unit economics of a given type of business.

Also, I can’t help but recount an anecdote from the last time I was at an all-you-can-eat place… conveyor-belt sushi with my kids.

A pair of guys came in and sat at the table next to us. They said a loud ironic prayer begging indulgence for “the sins we are about to commit” as they sat down… then proceeded to unwrap all the fish rolls, eating the contents as sashimi and discarding the rice and veggies on a tray on their table. By the time we left there was probably 8 lbs of rice on the tray… can’t believe they weren’t kicked out.

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> I’d happily read a book with each chapter breaking down the unit economics of a given type of business.

Not 100% on-point, but check out Roadside MBA, [1] which was written by a trio of MBA professors. Instead of using the case study method with examples from huge companies, they do a deep dive on small businesses that they visited on cross-country roadtrips. Very entertaining and accessible.

1: https://www.amazon.com/Roadside-MBA-Entrepreneurs-Executives...

The author (Paul Oyer, Yale MBA) also has some entertaining videos, and a book, on the economics of online dating.

I actually reached out to him to see if he would sign a copy of the book for my daughter, with whom I read the book during COVID. He was happy to do so, and did the same for his new book on the economics of sports.

I don't plan to read the book about online dating with my daughter, but perhaps she'll read it on her own someday!

The hardcover costs $5. I think it's the cheapest brand new hardcover price I've seen.

Edit: It's $5 for a used edition. Then my comment is now moo.

> Edit: It's $5 for a used edition. Then my comment is now moo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62necDwQb5E

I've never been to an AYCE sushi joint that didn't charge for the leftovers described in this example, for what it's worth.

Yeah every conveyor belt place I have been to just charges by the plate.

I've toyed around with the idea of doing an article where the spreadsheet gets progressively more complicated with how to model major business types.

Maybe I should do it!

Please do. I for one would be interested!

Seconded!

Thirded

I would subscribe to this too!

I'm sure you get the idea, but I'll go forth as well.

(Pun intended)

In my opinion you could teach both economics and common spreadsheet usage. Just please do not make it Excel-specific, many people here use Linux desktops. I would suggest LO Calc as it runs everywhere, or maybe Google Sheets as a distant second.

Thanks for the suggestion!

I was planning Google Sheets, since I'm on Linux and don't have excel.

I am hoping for something I can embed in the actual article.

I didn't even know about LO Calc. I'll check it out.

Please do. That would be great. Thanks

Please do it .

I would love to know about the economics of theme parks. They require huge amounts of land, a massive upfront capital investment in the rides, and require a ton of logistics to coordinate the many workers required to run a place that often isn’t open year round (thinking Carowinds or six flags, not Disney). They also have to advertise continuously and serve an extremely elastic industry (people will cut theme park visits before cutting down on grocery store visits).

Like when do operators decide to invest in a new ride and what’s the payback cycle like?

The Park Database has a great 3-park blog series on the business of theme parks. This is part I, the others are linked from there: http://www.theparkdb.com/blog/the-business-of-theme-parks-pa...

They have a really interesting blog overall.

This is amazing. Thanks for the link! If someone else reads this comment please upvote this person.

> They also have to advertise continuously and serve an extremely elastic industry (people will cut theme park visits before cutting down on grocery store visits).

Of course, elasticity goes in both directions. Demand that can be cut quickly, can also expand quickly.

Toilet paper is almost the opposite. And the extremely inelastic (and thus stable) demand means that competition is sharp and everything needs to be hyperoptimized for your business to stand a chance. There's almost no slack in the system, because that would be a needless expense.

There's also this video from Wendover Productions on that topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oESoI6XxZTg

> They require huge amounts of land, a massive upfront capital investment

I believe I once read a quip in The Economist about golf courses being a good investment for the second owner (the first usually going bankrupt).

Everything you say is correct. There is one other significant cost that isn't mentioned here: liability insurance and legal counsel. If a little kid (sorry) loses an arm, or worse (don't ask me how I know) because of a ride, there is some serious $$$ involved. I may or may not know one of the most high-powered attorneys who ever represented (past tense) amusement park companies.

And no, this isn't going anywhere. I'm not going to contact anybody for an interview or write a blog. This is everyday life in the real world. So much stuff going on that no one ever thinks about...

>By the time we left there was probably 8 lbs of rice on the tray… can’t believe they weren’t kicked out.

Why should they be? It's likely that the restaurant still charged them for the full price of the plates that were removed from the belt, regardless of whether or not they ate everything that was on said plate.

If they're otherwise quiet, respectful and paying customers, what about picking apart their food warrants kicking them out? As another user suggested, what happens if you don't eat the crust at a pizza joint?

Edit: Since I'm getting a lot of similar replies here, I'll point out that OP has since clarified that the conveyor belt sushi joint that they went to, contrary to how they are usually run, did in fact charge a "flat fee" for access to the sushi train. Hence my confusion - this is a deviation from the norm.

Edit 2: Kinda interesting watching the up/downvote progression in this thread. My initial post, despite being incorrect, was decently upvoted. Now that I've clarified that I was wrong and tried to correct myself, I'm getting downvoted. Neat!

it sounds like it was an all you can eat place, the few one I go to has signs up saying if you don't eat what you take you may be charged an extra plate (I've never seen them actually enforce it, I assume it's more for people who go make a giant bowl and then eat almost none of it).

Conveyor-belt sushi does not charge the same way a traditional "all you can eat" buffet restaurant charges. See my comment here[0].

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38562309

This one does/did.

WRONG.

Bears! Beets! Battlestar Galactica!

> the restaurant still charged them for the full price of the plate

At all-you-can-eat buffets, customers are charged a flat rate, not per plate.

Obviously this breaks down if people are taking plates of food and chucking them in the trash.

EDIT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro2_bQkaG5U&t=84s

No this anecdote is about conveyor belt sushi, which in my experience is pay by the color coded plate

No, in this case, it was a flat rate up front.

Basically 100% a buffet except the table moves to you (which, to the point of the original article, waiting for your preferred sushi to come around probably slows down consumption and improves the economics)

Obviously if people want to buy food and waste it that's on them. But this was a pretty clear abuse of the restaurant's business model as well.

OP specifically specifies that this was a "conveyor-belt sushi" restaurant. Those are only "all you can eat" in the sense that you're welcome to pull as many plates as you'd like off of the belt, but each plate is usually priced at one of a few different levels, and you will be charged for the total value of the plates you removed from the belt.

Eg, if yellow plates are $1, blue plates are $2, and orange plates are $3, and you pulled two orange plates, a blue plate and a yellow plate, your total would come out to $9 even if you didn't clear your plates.

That's not how this place works, and clearly it would have been less offensive behavior if it was.

So either that isn't all-you-can-eat, or I don't understand the definition of all-you-can-eat.

The confusion, as clarified elsewhere between GP and I in this thread, lies in the fact that you don't usually see an actual "all you can eat conveyor belt sushi" restaurant - they traditionally charge by the plate but you're welcome to order as much as you want. In point of fact, the restaurant OP went to bucked that trend and was actually a flat-fee conveyor belt joint.

As far as I can tell, most conveyor belt sushi places charge by plate.

But most all-you-can-eat sushi places use a conveyor belt.

This will be amusing - how do you think conveyor sushi places charge if not by the plate?

This will be amusing - how did you make it this far into this chain, past my first comment that contained my edit explaining how I made this mistake? Unless you're just being a dick for the sake of being a dick, of course...

No, go ahead and answer the question. How does a kaiten sushi place charge for their food, Mr know it all?

Again - yikes.

“All you can eat” rarely means “you can eat as much as you can afford” but rather means “you pay one price and can eat as much as you like for that price”.

That a conveyor belt is involved doesn’t change the offer.

Correct. The confusion, as noted elsewhere in this comment chain, lies in the fact that most conveyor belt sushi joints are not all you can eat, and the format of the restaurant that OP went to is rare.

No, there is no confusion in the comment chain. YOU are confused.

Did you really show up to this comment chain two days later to repeatedly highlight how I'm wrong after I already corrected myself repeatedly throughout?

And if I am a part of this comment chain, and I am confused (admittedly so, I should remind you), is there not confusion in the comment chain? :)

Boy, you should probably step outside and touch some grass or, I dunno, maybe let stuff like this bother you a bit less. Yikes.

Edit: And no, contary to your suggestion, I'm pretty comfortable not deleting my comments - I don't mind publicly making a mistake and then owning it. Thanks for the thought, though! :)

They clearly said it was all-you-can-eat and the behavior and reaction are very much fitting the context. Why are you assuming you know better than them the restaurant they went to?

Yes, flat-rate sushi conveys exist.

>Why are you assuming you know better than them the restaurant they went to?

OP clarified, and I thanked them for clarifying and acknowledged I was wrong. I've further mentioned as much in additional comments[1, 2, 3], and I've edited my original post to clear things up. Care to continue being snarky despite my attempts to correct myself?

>Yes, flat-rate sushi conveys exist.

And are, by and large, less common than per-plate joints, hence the confusion.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38562397

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38563087

[3]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38563030

I've visited two conveyor-belt sushi locations - one in Japan and one here in the US. The one in Japan followed the colored plate system, however the US one just worked off a flat $20 fee.

Completely wrong.

Absolutely untrue in all states of Germany and Austria I've visited. People here would flip out if conveyor belt sushi was priced any other way but with a simple flat rate.

The entire world is not just Japan or the USA, please be respectful of this.

This place charged a flat fee at the door, then everything inside is all-you-can-eat.

Interesting, I've never seen that at a conveyor-belt sushi joint before. That's not how they traditionally operate.

There's a conveyor belt hot pot by me which does it both ways. You choose whether everyone at the table will do the normal method where they count up your plates and price based on the color, or pay a flat rate for however much you wish to eat. In the case of the latter, they reserve the right to tack on a fee if you're wasting food.

Most all-you-can-eat places I've been to have rules against food waste.

> Edit 2: Kinda interesting watching the up/downvote progression in this thread. My initial post, despite being incorrect, was decently upvoted. Now that I've clarified that I was wrong and tried to correct myself, I'm getting downvoted. Neat!

Because people didn't know you were wrong before, and it's usually good to make factually incorrect comments be gray.

Sometimes NPR's Planet Money podcast does this but it's generally 10-15 minutes at a pop coverage of a specific theory or news item for general audience, they covered buffets recently in a different way

https://www.npr.org/2023/10/27/1197954459/all-you-can-eat-bu...

I find NPR Planet Money to be the shallowest and most unsatisfying of takes possible on pretty much every issue they take on.

It’s often the starting point for me to investigate something further, even This American Life might mention something and I have to look it up for proper context.

Any better recommendations? I used to listen to 99% invisible, but the quality is not always sustained. Planet Money is rather entertaining still.

Sorry, no, it was just easy for me to get into this one because I’ve listened to it on the radio for so long I know what to expect style wise.

Deliberate food wasters are despicable.

It's rice. It's not like they're wasting anything significant, like the meat of an animal that gave its life. But still, the restaurant should have charged them for it at least, like every other all you can eat sushi place would have.

"like the meat of an animal that gave its life." - that's generally not how it works.

Outside of some restaurants in South Korea, we generally only eat dead animals.

I assume the GP takes issue with the word "gave", as it was not given but taken.

Can something be taken without being given?

If I kill you and take your land/stuff/body, did you give it or did I take it?

Both.

A question for the pedants.

No. That is why there is no word or concept for theft

Yes, it can be “taken away from one”. Frankly, quite forcibly. It’s a rather simple concept to understand.

Bit of a tangent, but nearly all foods have an animal death rate per calorie, so there's no such thing as insignificant food.

The exchange rate is usually better for grains than for e.g. chicken or even beef[0], though.

[0] https://animalvisuals.org/projects/1mc/ Note that I'm a little skeptical of the numbers here, particularly those for grass-fed beef. Not that it matters for the purpose of claiming rice has a cost in lives.

Relevant SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-10-09

Kind of an interesting link. Another thing to keep in mind is that the rice patty being there means a natural habitat is now lost to make way for the farm. In truth there is no guilt free meal or anything else.

Well, we can relatively easily put a dollar value on human lives, too.

So any kind of waste that we can put a dollar value on, also has a value in human lives.

Make of that what you will.

I think this is an interesting idea, and people inclined towards veganism might be able to better achieve their goals by going for a suffering-minimizing diet, but the studies this is based on aren't very good. For example:

> 33 field mice were fitted with radio collars and tracked before and after harvest. The researchers found that only 3 percent of them were actually killed by the combine harvester (amounting to one mouse). An additional 52 percent of them (17 mice) were killed following harvest by predators such as owls and weasels, possibly due to their loss of the crop cover. It is unknown how many of these mice would have been eaten by owls or weasels anyway.

That last sentence is key: without a control you can't draw much from this experiment.

Additionally, while they say "animals" many times they're not clear on which ones they're including. The decision on whether to consider insects would be especially important.

All food waste is significant.

Quite the opposite

Not really.

Carbohydrates are much cheaper than proteins and fat.

Proteins and fat of vegetable origin are cheaper than those of animal origin, but they come accompanied by excessive amounts of carbohydrates.

The most efficient way of getting food for human consumption for now is to dump as waste most of the carbohydrates from vegetables and retain only the valuable proteins and fat (this can be done at home for instance by making bread but washing the dough before baking in order to remove most of the starch, producing thus a protein-enriched bread, or by removing completely the starch by extra washing of the dough, converting in into gluten a.k.a. seitan).

The high proportion of carbohydrates from vegetable food can be used completely only by those who do hard physical work, but not by those who have a sedentary lifestyle, who must necessarily dump the carbohydrates as waste, either directly or indirectly (by buying food where the carbohydrates have already been wasted in various ways, including as energy sources for animals that have been raised for becoming food).

In the future it might be possible to develop better ways to use the carbohydrates that must be wasted now, by converting them with high efficiency into proteins or fat, by using bacterial or fungal cultures.

Are you arguing that wasting meat is more significant than wasting vegetation? I agree, but that doesn't diminish the fact that wasting both is significant.

Are you arguing that everyone should be vegetarian? That's a topic I was not even remotely touching on.

No, I was arguing that wasting a fraction of the carbohydrate part of the food that is produced is currently a necessity for a healthy human nutrition, even if most people are not aware of this.

For now, there exists no way of producing enough proteins and fats without also producing an excessive amount of carbohydrates, which must be wasted in some way or another.

One way of using the excess amount of carbohydrates from vegetable food is by feeding animals or mushrooms, to obtain food with a more favorable proportion of proteins or fat (and this is a form of food wasting, as less food is obtained as output than it is provided as input), but another way is just dumping the excess carbohydrates (i.e. starch or sugars), after using food processing methods that separate the protein-rich or fat-rich parts.

When humans eat the excess amount of carbohydrates instead of dumping them as waste, the result is obesity, which is a worse choice than wasting the undesirable food.

It was rice but rice is a filler. Don’t know that the ratio is but let’s say 1:4 non-rice to rice. Dumping the rice skews that a lot.

Ironically the word "sushi" refers to the rice, not the topping. Rice properly seasoned with vinegar and sugar is the one essential ingredient in sushi. If there's no rice it's no longer sushi.

The word has a broader meaning in English, though. We'll often refer to things like raw fish alone, ie sashimi, as sushi.

Thankfully there's still us pedants explaining repeatedly the difference between sashimi and sushi to anyone who will listen, and quite often those who won't.

I've never had either.

It’s okay, in Japan, for lots of people spaghetti means any kind of pasta dish.

Rice has a significant climate footprint due to the methane produced by the agriculture. It also requires a lot of fresh water to grow. (How much of an issue the latter is depends on the local conditions, of course.)

There's few things in your life that will impact the environment less than not finishing a bowl of rice.

you're right, but a lifestyle that makes a habit of adding those small things up left and right becomes impactful quickly.

That may be true, if done on occasion rather than regularly. But just because it's "only" rice doesn't make it insignificant, even though rice is such a staple that it may seem so. That's what I commented on.

Food in general is a significant part of our ecological footprint. Rice has a relatively high impact for a crop. Of course it's still in a different ballpark than beef.

Depends on the amount of rice obviously. Rice farming definitely has an impact on the environment in bulk. Now divide that by the amount of rice in a roll and we'll see how significant it is.

I'm guessing it's very, very small.

Don't forget as well that it's not only a case of them not eating the rice, they also massively increased their intake of fish by skipping the carbs.

It's a safe assumption that such all you can eat sushi was of mediocre quality.

But, when it comes to the real deal. Sushi from a tier one or two Japanese sushi chef then the rice is actually the most important factor in making good sushi.

Discarding the rice would be seen as comparatively barbarian as dunking a freshly made piece of sushi by a good chef into this mixture of soya sauce and ersatz "wasabi".

Someone had to plant it, then water it and cultivate it, then harvest it, then package it, then ship it god knows how many miles, then the restaurant cooked it, prepared it, then they just threw it away. Then comes the trash processing chain.

How is that not a completely useless waste of energy, time, money and resources?

This is a very human-centric view ;)

I'm in the "every life is sacred" camp, but...even if you do kill one animal and leave it to rot, it's not a total waste, just a "cruel" one.

Other things feed off of the carcasses of animals the same as you or I do. We just consider all other organisms beneath us, so if we kill and discard something, we write it off as a total waste. Birds, dogs, rodents and microorganisms disagree.

More despicable than other kinds of wasters? Eating only the part of the food you like can't be that morally different from buying a sporty car that wastes gas, for example.

They hacked the business model.

Check out a book called Growth Units, which dives into unit economics across different business types.

The closest thing I could think of was the economics of everyday things.

https://freakonomics.com/series/everyday-things/

Available as a podcast

The profit calculator from NYMag was a great series of articles about the economics of business from investment banks, to drug dealers, to yoga studios. https://nymag.com/news/features/2007/profit/

Have pondered slurping down pizza toppings and discarding the crusts...

I had an acquaintance about a decade ago who did this on the grounds that they were “gluten sensitive”. It was weird.

People eating “low carb” also do this. It’s recommended in the Atkins book IIRC.

My cousin who has Coeliac disease used to do this every so often. We also made pizza with a non-wheat base for her.

Can't really fault her for this weirdness, she has it rough enough.

My sister who has celiac wouldn’t dare, way too much potential for contamination from the crust.

Definitely. My cousin isn't always the strictest with her diet, even if it ain't good for her.

I'd be interested in seeing a study on different health outcomes for crust-eaters and crust-avoiders in their 30s and 40s. Do crust-avoiders (or hambuger-bun avoiders) suffer less from obesity or type 2 diabetes due to getting that much less intake of carbs?

Pizza meats are incredibly high in fat, the cheese is very high in fat and sugar, and the sauce is high in sugar. It's possible the bread is the least calorie dense part of the pizza per unit of satiety.

Eating fat is great for satiety. If you keep carbs below a certain threshold and eat only (good) fat and protein, it’s pretty much impossible to get obese.

Sounds like a category error, confusing the sadism of extracting oversized value from restaurateur with the deliciousness of food.

At least, I've never had a hankering for a water and a half pound of tiny slivers of sashimi.

The prank of taking the same amount of sushi and leaving it in a neat stack would be closer to enlightenment.

I mean, they are perfectly within their right if that behavior is not explicitly disallowed.

Over here, all-you-can-eat Asian shops generally operate on one of two principles (sometimes combined):

1. You can only order 5 things per person per 10 minutes

2. For every X amount of weight left over you pay a penalty

Kicked out for what? If they want to disincentivize wasting rice, they should charge for leftovers and offer sashimi as an upsell. If they don't, that's on the restaurant.

Ultimately depends on the restaurant - we had an AYCE sushi, hibachi restaurant we loved with a style different than a conveyor belt that gracefully handled the issue.

The restaurant had a to-go by-weight option. For the dine in patrons, you would check boxes on a menu slip with your order, quantity, etc.

Their menu included a simple request that patrons reasonably finish each plate before submitting a new order, that being honest kept their prices reasonable, and that patrons wasting entire orders would be charged on a per-weight basis for the wasted order at their discretion.

That line of thinking usually pairs with 'If there isn't a law against it then it must be Ok'. So the world becomes burdened with complex rules and laws to prevent people having to live in a hellscape of Jerks.

I don't eat rice; I've been strictly keto for over a decade. My health choices make me a jerk?

Some people are allergic to rice. Some people are on medically prescribed diets. Maybe there's an obscure religion that forbids eating rice. Some people just don't like rice. Are they all jerks too?

That restaurant wouldn't be my preference, but if I did have to be there for an important reason, I certainly wouldn't be bullied into eating something I didn't want to eat. I'm generally strict about wasting food, but in that situation I wouldn't feel even slightly guilty about it.

Ordering a dish that is mostly rice knowing that you won't/can't eat it is being a jerk, yes. I don't know about that restaurant, but I've never seen a sushi place that didn't also serve sashimi.

You could always speak with the staff about your dietary restrictions as is standard practice for the allergic, intolerant, and such.

If they can accommodate your request, and they typically will, you’re golden. If not, you may need to patronize a different business. It is, after all, a reciprocal relationship. If your basic needs aren’t met, and they have a stiff policy on substitution - then yes, you are a jerk for ignoring them.

That's exactly my point.

You're probably focusing on the wrong thing if you're jumping to the defense of people who leave things on the plate for any reason.

The actual controversy here is that the folks in the story clearly thought they were cheating the system, and people are responding without questioning that, and some people are questioning that.

That's certainly a possibility, but none of us have enough information to say for sure.

The sins thing is about as clear as you can get.

Unless you're going to call the entire story fake, then yes we have enough information.

That's actually precisely the problem. People abusing the system make things more difficult for people who have legitimate reasons to be the exception to the rule (e.g. people with allergies).

That's a problem, but it's not the problem. I'm not sure why you guys are acting like it's an unreasonable suggestion for a sushi restaurant to serve sashimi.

I don't think that anyone is objecting to them serving sashimi. People are objecting to people throwing out most of the sushi rolls and only eating the fish. Both because doing so is wasteful and because it appears to be willfully abusing an unintentional oversight in a way that hurts the people running the business.

Because living in a world where every bad behavior is prevented through enforcement mechanisms and bureaucratic procedure sucks ass, compared to a world where people generally speaking follow a social contract. If you can't understand why then you might not be thinking about it hard enough. It introduces friction, especially on those who would already have behaved well.

This is the internet after all.

Sushi restaurants also selling sashimi is "bureaucratic"? That's a strange take.

Why? Charging for leftovers and offering sashimi as an upsell is certainly one mechanism the restaurant can use. And so is reserving the right to refuse serving customers they don't like, and making use of that right every once in a while.

It's up to the market (ie patrons and restraunts) to decide which mix of policies they prefer.

They're free to use that mechanism, but it shouldn't come as a surprise to the customer. That accomplishes nothing other than wasted food, upset patrons, and credit card disputes.

You are right in some sense.

Though it wouldn't come as too much of a surprise to reasonable customers when you kick out unreasonable customers.

You are right that (bad) surprises are bad for commercial transactions. Most restaurants, especially all-you-can-eat joints, have some rules written down somewhere about these kind of situations.

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