Posted on 01/27/2020 5:20:07 PM PST by DUMBGRUNT
Like most restaurants, buffets operate on extremely thin margins: For every $20 in revenue, $19 might go toward overhead, leaving $1 (5%) in net profit.
Larry’s got a reputation around town for being a gourmand. He’s got an appetite that puts Homer Simpson to shame — and on this particular day, he’s ready to do some serious damage.
Larry pays his $20 and proceeds to eat 5 servings of steak and chicken, far more than the average customer.
The cost of this food to the buffet amounts to $16.90. This means that after factoring in other expenses, Larry has handed the restaurant a loss of -$8.50.
While the restaurant loses $8.50 on Larry, it makes $3.70 from the under-eater and still takes in its steady $1 margin on the average eater.
. Over the years, buffets have made headlines for kicking out guests who eat too much:
A 6’6″, 350-pound Wisconsin man was removed from a buffet after downing 12 fried fish fillets (and subsequently arrested for protesting outside). A German triathlete was asked to prematurely leave an $18.95 buffet after consuming 100 plates of sushi. A woman was booted from a Golden Corral for eating all the brownies, then attempting to smuggle home extras in her purse.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehustle.co ...
I’m laughing at the Golden Corral example of the woman who ate ALL of the brownies then tried to smuggle more out in her purse. I swear I have seen the Klumps there.
I dare not say more except that they do have good fried chicken.
Boston Sea Party, that brings back memories. Took a guy there who was from far West Texas and another guy from Kansas. One had never eaten lobster and pulled the tail off and slung junk all over. The other didn’t know to peel the shrimp. There was another place in Houston that could do some damage, Victoria Station, big good bbq ribs and beer on game night for a buck each. That was back when the SWA stewardesses were as young as I was but they wore hot pants.
When I was a kid I worked for a floor installer. We did one of the local cafes late one Saturday night / Sunday morning. The place was almost perpetually open like the Denny’s that was remodeled out by Wheeler, Texas and nobody could find the key to the front door since it had never been locked.
Well, we pulled the grills and so forth out from the wall. Oh my. we found everything in town that had gone missing and some other stuff as well. I scraped grease with a tile scraper and shoveled it out. Never ate there again even though it was sort of clean when we left.
You’ll be pleased to know they just did a remodel. It’s definitely worth a visit.
Shoveled it out? Wow! That sounds like a lot of stuff. It is really gross apparently what goes on behind those kitchen doors, in I guess most restaurants.
>>Vegas: The only place where you can lose $5K on a saturday night and still be excited to find a $1.99 buffet on Sunday morning.<<
I like going to Vegas. Since I don’t gamble, I can indulge in all the things they offer to entice gamblers to come.
The late comedian John Pinette used to great routines about buffets.
“I would never want to go through being a young person again unless I could take my older brain back with me...”
I came to that same conclusion years ago. No way would I want to make all of those mistakes again, even if I were lucky enough to live through them again, which is unlikely.
That was sort of the premise of the movie “Peggy Sue Got Married”. What if you could be transported back in time, back to say HS but with all the knowledge you have now in your 40’s or 50’s? What choices you made back then might be different with hindsight and what alternative choices you might make with that knowledge, may not be any better.
“give me a seafood buffet with all-you-can-eat lobster”
Nordic Lodge in Rhode island, cost about $100 bucks, all you can eat seafood including lobster. Never been but it’s on the list.
Don’t get me wrong-I had a great childhood and maturing through my twenties, but...just as often, it was exceedingly painful since I seemed incapable of making the right decisions in some aspects of life, and had to learn so much the hard way.
I know everyone is kind of like that, and that I have lots of company, but...I didn’t enjoy some of those downsides.
I enjoy being an old guy and knowing who I am and what I am about...and I am still often wrong when I think I am so right, but...I feel like the context is simply much clearer for me, and I can deal with it.
Honestly, that is a humbling thing, to realize I thought I was much smarter at the age of 17 than I think I am now...
“I go to a buffet whenever I feel like getting ecoli or botulism poisoning.”
And then we have this:
https://nypost.com/2019/12/30/homeless-man-turns-manhattan-whole-foods-into-his-personal-hot-bar/
B I N G O. Eat light, stay away from bread, large meat portions, and sodas. Enjoy lots of tasty small samples, with room for dessert.
Vegas buffets are another issue. They used to be worth going to, but now they have priced themselves out of my business. Have not been in years.
Now that’s funny.
Well put. I have wondered, though, to what extent having youthful vigor and hormones would lead someone into making rash decisions despite having mature judgment. Certainly there were times when I was young when I knew something was a bad idea, but did it anyway.
True story: decades ago I was stationed at Tinker AFB, OK. A friend and I used to go to Shakey’s Pizza for lunch, where they featured an all-you-can-eat buffet of pizza and fried chicken. My friend, Jim, was a lanky, beanpole sort of guy who heavily salted his food and had a prodigious appetite. After we had been going there a while, with Jim devouring as much as he could get his hands on before we ran out of time and had to go back to work, the manager stopped us at the door and asked Jim to open his briefcase, apparently suspecting that Jim was smuggling food out. He wasn’t. We kept making inroads on Shakey’s profit line for a few more weeks until the same manager stopped us at the door and told us that we weren’t welcome back.
In the mid to late 80s, I did a fair amount of work in Nevada. Back then, it seemed that the casinos would price their buffets to break even, or even take a loss, so that people would come to eat and stay to lose their money at the tables. At some point, I think the casinos figured out that people would come and lose their money anyway, so they raised the food prices.
I haven’t been to Las Vegas for quite a few years, either, though I live less than two hundred miles away.
I’ve always said that if I’m scheduled for execution, my last meal would be an all you can eat buffet......
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8i4eQm8VgI
John Pinette, comedian on buffets. (John is a bit on the larger size.)
My dad had a story about he and three of his Air Force buddies getting booted from an All-You-Can-Eat spaghetti place back in the 1950’s. The owner came out from the kitchen and told them “That’s all you can eat!”
All the Shakeys seem to be on the west coast and Mexico.
All in the midwest went away long ago.
Local legend had it that the Shakeys in DesPlains Il. was using dog food as a topping!!
Allegedly, cases of empty Alpo(?) cans in the dumpster.
I had been there shortly before they closed seemed ok???
That said, for some reason, I now like to make a few circles around the bed each night?
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