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The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets

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Re: The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets

#131

Post by cbanek »

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.

Re: The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets

#132

Post by xenocyon »

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.

Re: The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets

#134

Post by oogali »

fortran77 wrote: post #55

They mention Golden Corral. They save money, notoriously, by serving "Dumpster-Aged" ribs. https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1hubzj/all_you_can_... There's even an ad they ran that featured this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lj43JdXjLNQ

That’s a parody ad, not an official Golden Corral ad.

Re: The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets

#136

Post by unishark »

rsync wrote: post #117
Jommi wrote: post #56

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 happen…

"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.

Re: The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets

#137

Post by unishark »

marcosdumay wrote: post #91
Jommi wrote: post #56

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 happen…

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.

Re: The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets

#138

Post by ingsoc79 »

ValentineC wrote: post #121
derefr wrote: post #114

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 restauran…

> 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.

Re: The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets

#139

Post by arkitaip »

katzgrau wrote: post #16

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 attenti…

> 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...

Re: The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets

#140

Post by Mikeb85 »

katzgrau wrote: post #16

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 attenti…

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.

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