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Comment by stephenr | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like a uniquely American thing to me. I've never heard of this concept anywhere except California.

Everywhere I've worked on-site, if people wanted to eat together they just did that weird thing people do and talk to one another.

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There's a delicate art to these negotiations if you want to end up going someplace good.

You can't just come out and say where you want to go, because it will get swatted down by everybody else who wants the Barbeque Joint or Sushi House or Rubio's Fish Tacos or Thai Garden. You have to let them wear each other down for a while until all the good options are off the table and everybody is resigning themselves to compromise on that lame soup place or Applebees or whatever.

Then you strike with Mama's Mexican Kitchen. Everybody will be so relieved that they don't have to eat another f'ng TGI Friday's meatloaf that they'll jump on the idea, even if they weren't in much of a Mexican mood 45 minutes ago when this stupid negotiation started.

As I said. If you want sushi and no one else does, just go get fucking sushi and let them eat each other's toe jam if they want.

Why must you eat lunch with your coworkers every single day?

Another tactic is to suggest McDonalds, which causes everyone to think of better ideas. This can be applied to other things as well.

https://medium.com/@ienjoy/mcdonalds-theory-9216e1c9da7d

It's probably an extremely Dutch thing to do, but we have fresh bread delivered daily and sandwich filling in the fridge. On fridays some of us eat at various places near the office.

Sounds like an amazing place, frankly.

One thing I miss about Australia (I live in Thailand now) is places to get good fresh bread/sandwiches etc., at short notice.

Yeah... at my office this leads to endless amounts of bikeshedding, because the goal is consensus and everyone gets a veto. We would wind up at the same three spots every damn time.

I shortcut this by appointing myself lunch dictator.

That sounds annoying. It's not hard to not care where you eat on any particular day.

It works surprisingly well. It turns out most people are happy just to have the pointless bikeshedding stop.

I'd counter with it's even easier to just eat what you want, alone on a particular day.

One place in the UK I worked at had something similar-ish - a breakfast butty ordering system. You designed your breakfast butty and pressed order, it would generate a spreadsheet at the of the day, for emailing to the cob shop. Someone would pick them up on the way to work the next day, distribute them and take the money.

I don't always feel like eating what other people want to eat, the problem here is finding every day some kind of food that everybody in the group wants to eat.

I always wanted to build an app that would track our preferences every day of the week, and then with machine learning predict what the team wants to eat on any given day.

So go eat what you want and let them eat what they want for a day.

I really cannot believe this is a thing.

I see you made this comment several times here, so let me try and explain...

Sometimes the office pays for group lunch, if you want something else, feel free to go, but prepare to pay for it yourself (This is rarely the reason to stick with a lunch group you don't enjoy).

When a group decides to go out to lunch, it's not because they all want to eat the same thing, it's because they enjoy it or recognize that it's good for office morale. Picking where to eat is a small inconvenience in this regard.

Most of the time, the problem is not too many choices, it's indecision. Everyone is hungry, they all want to eat something Good, but if you ask them what you want, they can't decide. If you put a CHOICE, most people will say eh, there must be something better. But almost everyone is content or doesn't really care what to eat if there's a solid decision in place. That's why these apps take the decision making out.

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