now im hungry
The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets
211–220 of 272 posts
Re: The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets
#212"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.
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.
Re: The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 electri…
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...
Re: The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets
#214"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'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.
Re: The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pi…
> 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.
Re: The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets
#216back 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
Re: The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets
#217I'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 drea…
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…
As of 2014 it existed.
Re: The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 significan…
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.
Re: The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets
#219I 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 l…
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.
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.
Re: The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets
#220"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.
Maybe in the USA. I doubt that will be true in Japan and other places that value the social aspect of eating out often.