171–180 of 182 posts
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I knew a girl from Akron who referred to it as "Crackron". She painted a pretty bleak picture but it was of course anecdotal. Would you say it's worth visiting next time I'm nearby?
I wouldn't make a pit stop in Akron. I can't imagine there would be too many interesting activities for tourists. There is a lot to see and do in Cleveland, which is only a 30 minute drive from Akron.
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Weather seems like a commonly-stated reason for leaving Ohio. I'm from here, so I obviously take note of it, but I do wonder if people commonly talk about leaving places like Boston and NYC for warmer climates. Those areas seem to have equally miserable winter weather.
Bostonian here. We hate our summers and our winters. We're pretty much constantly grouchy about the weather, save for a few weeks in the spring and fall.
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I've eaten at places in the US where they're straight up confused/offended if you don't doggie bag your leftovers. "What? Was there something wrong?" "No, i'm in a hotel and don't really have anywhere to store or reheat it." "Yeah, but... Are you sure you want it?"
Haha, yes. A friend of mine went to live in the states for a while. The first time he saw people taking their unfinished meals with them he thought he was eating in some kind of restaurant/food shelter combination. Needless to say, he quickly caught on to the trend and now actively advocates it over the European system.
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Bostonian here. We hate our summers and our winters. We're pretty much constantly grouchy about the weather, save for a few weeks in the spring and fall.
What's up with the summers? I know that Boston (and New England generally) can have very cold and snowy winters. I had visited in fall once and it was great. Interested to know how summer is.
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Hahaha. That is true. One of my favorite ways of getting used to this is thinking of my biggest competitors as friends (or trying to). I would say "keep your enemies closer" but I really don't think of them as enemies. On the advice of my business coach I usually call my competitors to chat every once in a while and I think we mutually realize that we're just trying our best not to go obsolete. We also need each othe…
> When a new competitor shows up, they are usually inexperienced and either won't last long or will end up joining our club of friends. That's just how it works. Not that I am a lawyer, but depending on your jurisdiction, you will need to be careful about what topics you can and cannot discuss. Antitrust and consumer protection laws can bite you if you stray into the wrong subject.
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Well, if it looks like a duck ;-)... (Born and raised in Columbus here).
Weather seems like a commonly-stated reason for leaving Ohio. I'm from here, so I obviously take note of it, but I do wonder if people commonly talk about leaving places like Boston and NYC for warmer climates. Those areas seem to have equally miserable winter weather.
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Here's a thought experiment for you. Collect one copy of every restaurant menu written in English. Scan each menu to find food items that are primarily liquid in character. Note the word used to describe it, and the price of the item. Find the median list price for each word. In your thought experiment, does the median price of a "soup" differ significantly from the median prices of "bisque", "stew", "chowder", "brot…
> pho So when you order pho at a restaurant they have purposely named it pho instead of soup in an attempt to sound more "high class?" I'm sorry, but this seems like an extreme view. Most of those words exist to describe something specific . Do you expect to see "A bunch of vegetables cooked in water" or "vegetable soup" on the menu? Is the later an attempt to charge you more? Take gazpacho as another example. It's a…
"Normal" restaurants don't know all the tricks to get customers to spend more money, but businesses for whom that marginal 1% of revenues is significant will absolutely pick over their menus looking for loaded words and design tweaks.
If you have ever seen a smiley face on your receipt, that is a psych trick. It is experimentally proven to increase tips for female servers in midscale casual dining restaurants. Squat, smile, mimic. Push appetizers, booze, and desserts. Say you enjoy a dish yourself. Touch customers on the shoulder. Tell a joke. Pose a brainteaser. If a server does any of those things to you, they may have done their tip-boosting research.
Menu tweaks are pretty simple, actually:
- put cheaper, high-margin items near the most expensive thing on your menu
- create seasonal specials
- introduce new menu items as specials, sides, or appetizers rather than as an entree
- draw boxes around the popular items, or highlight them in some way
- carefully match descriptive tone with the desired clientele
- destroy all currency symbols
- suggest beverage pairings with the entree listing
- make high-margin items more discoverable
- chunk your menu into graspable categories; a giant pile of items should form a tree rather than a flat list
- make the most expensive thing on your menu more expensive
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Here's a thought experiment for you. Collect one copy of every restaurant menu written in English. Scan each menu to find food items that are primarily liquid in character. Note the word used to describe it, and the price of the item. Find the median list price for each word. In your thought experiment, does the median price of a "soup" differ significantly from the median prices of "bisque", "stew", "chowder", "brot…
> It would be for the same reason that some restaurants don't put $ or numbers with two decimal places anywhere on the menu. I had thought it was a signifier that the place is supposed to be high-class; the implication to me is that open discussion of money is slightly distasteful and should be done as briefly as possible. (And leaving off decimal places in particular says "no one here is so regretfully poor as to co…
In the same way that freemium games elide your spends of real money behind a layer of invented virtual currency, the goal is to make the customer forget that they are spending actual money.
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> pho So when you order pho at a restaurant they have purposely named it pho instead of soup in an attempt to sound more "high class?" I'm sorry, but this seems like an extreme view. Most of those words exist to describe something specific . Do you expect to see "A bunch of vegetables cooked in water" or "vegetable soup" on the menu? Is the later an attempt to charge you more? Take gazpacho as another example. It's a…
No, I'm saying that when a chain restaurant with a psychologist on staff drafts the new menus, they will look at the entry for "Pho - Vietnamese rice noodle soup", and edit it to say "Pho - Vietnamese rice noodles in beef broth" instead. "Normal" restaurants don't know all the tricks to get customers to spend more money, but businesses for whom that marginal 1% of revenues is significant will absolutely pick over the…
But in your original post you included "pho" in the list of words that restaurants use to replace the word "soup." In this example "Pho" is not being used as a replacement for "soup."
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No, I'm saying that when a chain restaurant with a psychologist on staff drafts the new menus, they will look at the entry for "Pho - Vietnamese rice noodle soup", and edit it to say "Pho - Vietnamese rice noodles in beef broth" instead. "Normal" restaurants don't know all the tricks to get customers to spend more money, but businesses for whom that marginal 1% of revenues is significant will absolutely pick over the…
> "Pho - Vietnamese rice noodle soup", and edit it to say "Pho - Vietnamese rice noodles in beef broth" instead But in your original post you included "pho" in the list of words that restaurants use to replace the word "soup." In this example "Pho" is not being used as a replacement for "soup."
Quite a lot of people do not know restaurant dishes by their proper names. If you invent a name for your menu item, or use an existing name not common in the vernacular, you avoid most psychological associations with those words. You can describe a Reuben without ever using the words "sandwich", "meat", or "bread", for instance.
Reuben: corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese, and Russian dressing on rye; lightly toasted
You can even avoid saying "beef", "cheese", or "dressing".
Reuben: cured brisket, sauerkraut, Emmentaler, and Thousand Island on marbled rye; lightly toasted
"Reuben" is not a replacement for "sandwich". That's what it is, after all. But for this particular menu item, no one ever reads the word "sandwich", nor are they likely to say it when ordering. And when that word is not present, people are less likely to associate the restaurant dish with the thing they can almost certainly make at home at lower cost. That's the whole point. You're trying to avoid activating certain areas of the human brain that tend to rein in impulses and encourage activation of areas that stimulate reward-seeking behaviors.
It isn't rocket science, but it is a science. People get paid to experiment on how to encourage people to spend more money in retail stores, and the results they get are often significant enough to sell to businesses. Once you can see these particular fnords, you notice them everywhere. It's one of the reasons why I can hardly stand eating in casual dining chain restaurants any more: I see puppet strings attached to everything, from the moment I see the building to the second I leave.