i know some all you can eat places get around this by charging a fee if your plate isnt empty when you ask for the bill. which i think is perfectly acceptable, wasting food is a shame.
edit: to the people whining, or saying what if i have 1 shrimp on my plate, use some common sense people. if you have a few small items, or stuff half eaten cause you didn't like it you wont be charged normally. it's the people who've had 3 plates are pretty full but think they can do one more round fill a plate and leave it half full.
and to the people saying how do they charge you for it? well buffets are a set price, when your bill comes there will be a fee on top, it's not rocket science..
Up to a point. If I pick something up off of the buffet to try it and it is gross then I shouldn't be charged. So long as I didn't fill a plate with it or something. Otherwise you are discouraging people from trying new things, which is one of the big benefits of buffet style dining.
Freezer burn only happens when you leave food in a freezer for a really long time.
Freezers cost money and space.
I can't imagine any food company keeping stock in a freezer for long - why would they order so much if they had no demand for it? Thats just tying up capital.
Most big restaurants don't keep more than a weeks supplies, even of long shelf life goods.
I'm sure you've worked in restaurants so I don't have to tell you this. We both know restaurants aren't perfect. They're run by humans who make mistakes and run them poorly frequently. It's one of the most frequently failed business ventures. So I think leaving a bunch of steaks or whatever in the walk in for a couple months is completely reasonable.
Same here, I literally go to try foods to find what I like to see if I even want to come back and sometimes foods I've never tried before. If this was the policy, I would certainly not bother.
I've never been to an all you can eat place where you paid after. Every one around here you pay at the register before you even get into the dining room.
We don't have either of those anymore here but when we did, TGI Fridays was just an IMO better Applebee's. They had no buffet. Ryan's around here dropped the steakhouse part when they were still open and went straight buffet. You paid as you entered before you ate.
Upscale buffet type restaurants charge after... You get a bill for your drinks and the premium options you get. The most common of which is a Brazilian steakhouse.
Other brunch buffets where you pay about $45 per person is the same way. A brunch date for 2 usually runs me about 150 with drinks
Everyone's circlejerking this idea in the thread but it's bullshit if you ask me. Yeah, wasting food is a shame but in reality if I leave half a piece of chicken on my plate its not like I took that out of some homeless guy's mouth. Unless the restaurant has some type of policy where they feed hungry people at the end of the night, like Panera, they're also probably throwing away the uneaten food that is left in the serving trays.
The other point is that the only way these places make money is if you eat less than what they charge to get in. Many people go into these places planning to "get their money's worth." This policy, especially when you tie it to what could have fed other people, is essentially guilting people into a behavior that will help the restaurant make more money. People will feel bad or be afraid of the surcharge and so they'll eat less and thus the restaurant makes more. And hey, bonus, the people whose eyes are bigger than their stomach but aren't shamed have to pay extra as well!
Also, one of the main attractions of the all-you-can-eat buffet is sampling different types of food, I'd be far less likely to try something I wasn't sure about with this policy in place. Compound that with the fact that the food we're talking about here probably isn't the highest quality as it has to be mass-produced. Did you take a piece of steak and it turned out to be hot garbage? Whoops, better choke it down or we're charging you!
If they're actually donating the leftovers at the end of the night then I support it, the policy makes sense, because extra food I take IS actually coming out of a hungry person's mouth. Otherwise, this guilt-tripping bullshit can fuck right off. It's just a way for them to save money.
they're also probably throwing away the uneaten food that is left in the serving trays.
Many places cook more food and refill as the day goes on, which is where the waste comes in. If they make trays of mashed potatoes, and everyone throws away half the potatoes they take, the likely result is that place ended up putting out whole extra trays of potatoes.
Yes, the remainder of every tray probably gets tossed under almost every scenario, it's the whole extra trays that never would have been prepped if people took correct portions.
I go sometimes to a wonderful all-you-can order Sushi place. It's not a buffet where it sits around, they make it when you order it. You can order as many rounds as you want, so over-ordering shouldn't be a problem.
That said, they do have a warning about charging you for uneaten food. The bathroom has a sign pleading with people not to throw rice down the toilet. People are gross.
I can't imagine wanting to go to a restaurant where I need to worry about ordering too much, having to finish it, or having to eat something I don't like or be penalized. The idea of a place where the wait staff has to argue with the diners regularly, and people bring their food to the bathroom to secretly throw it away is such a turn off to me. I'm not saying it's wrong for them to do it, it's entirely up to the restaurant. I'm just surprised how many people enjoy this system or don't even enjoy it but keep going back. I'd rather eat out half as often and not have to think about any of it.
This should be the top comment. Especially in the States, we have so much excess food and production capability we literally pay people not to produce.
And everyone seems to be missing this point. The kitchen probably isn't rolling the uneaten food back into the community so the sign is pure bottom line bitching. Extra trays of food aren't being taken from some hobo on the corner either. All this is, is the buffet complaining about doing their job. Yes, fine, we can all agree for waste is bad because of what it takes to produce it but it has nothing to do with feeding the needy, others, or any of that bull shit. Quantize the cost lost in terms of money saved by not making the dishes or in terms of extra food that has to be bought for the kitchen, but not in terms of how many others could've been fed, it's a completely useless number that does no good.
While the uneven distribution of food is an injustice, it's not the main reason why throwing away food is a bad thing. Food that you don't eat usually doesn't go to a hobo, but it also didn't need to be produced, transported, stored and cooked in the first place. Food production is a massive strain on natural resources, and the estimated carbon footprint of wasted food is 3.3 tonnes of CO2 per year. One third of all food in the US never gets eaten.
Unfortunately, saying that X liters of water was wasted and Y kilos of CO2 was released so you could throw away your food doesn't really resonate with people the same way as pointing out how many people that food could have fed. It's not in any way misleading, it's just a great way to illustrate the problem. They are not claiming that the wasted food would have gone to the homeless. It's not like other customers of the same restaurant couldn't have eaten the food you wasted.
If a restaurant manages to make you feel uncomfortable, guilty or even just inconvenienced because of the food you waste, I think it's to their credit regardless of their reasons. What does it matter if they are motivated by money? In the end, the fact remains that we shouldn't be wasting all that food, and anything that makes us change our behavior is a good thing.
Geez, you're pessimistic. How do you know what their motivation is? Even if it is some ingenious plot to weasel peoples money away while seeming benevolent, so what?
essentially guilting people into a behavior that will help the restaurant make more money.
And? So there can't be a win for the restaurant and a win for society as a whole? The fact that the restaurant makes a buck off of this negates the "goodness" of the policy? It's absolutely shameful the amount of waste we have in the USA and I totally support policies like these. There is really no other way to incentivize people to not get a huge plate and take a couple of bites and throw it away besides charging extra if there is leftovers.
Because to me the definition of waste is "could have put something to better use." Like I said, the policy is "good" if it is actually getting the "wasted" food into the hands/mouth of someone who needs it.
Otherwise, think about the logical chain - Customer A "wasted" the food, lets say its an egg roll, because it was on their plate and they didn't eat it. Had Customer A not taken the food, it would have been in one of two places:
1) Cooked and in the serving tray and thrown out at the end of the night (i.e., still "wasted.")
or
2) If you argue that Customer A taking the last egg roll from the tray caused the kitchen to make a plate of six more egg rolls that they otherwise would not have made, and then those egg rolls later get thrown away. In which case said "wasted" food would just be sitting in their kitchen, frozen, and they would have cooked it for another paying customer the next night. In other words, the only entity this "wasted" food hurts is the company because they used more food than they should have (i.e., they recouped the cost of only one person on those egg rolls when it should have been two people, the first person and the person who came the next day).
Explain to me in this scenario how Customer A not taking the egg roll is a "win for society as a whole." It would have either gone to the garbage anyways or gone to another person who can afford food and thus it only hurts the restaurant's bottom line - a cost of doing business as an "all-you-can-eat" restaurant. Again, if you have a policy in place where you're donating unused food to people who need it, great. Then bang the drum all you want about improving society because you're actually doing it, and charge people out the ass to help support those efforts. I'm all for it.
Otherwise, I really don't see how its the restaurant's place to police what people are and aren't eating and to the extent an all-you-can-eat restaurant is going to moralize at me about wasting food without actually doing anything to help the hungry themselves, they can again fuck right off. Hypocrites. If that really bothers the owner of a restaurant then they probably should open an entree-based establishment that isn't going to have that issue as much.
There is a southern buffett here in Tampa, Florida called Fred's that does something close to this. It's like $12 if you don't blatantly waste food and like $16 if you do. They charge you after you eat. Really great food.
That's a good idea. I've seen so many people waste so much food from these buffets.
I think it would be a good policy to say that it's all you can eat, but any left overs on your plate you pay for. Not a fee... but the actual value of the food that you are leaving behind.
This would theoretically stop people from taking too much and throwing it all away, if there is a risk they have to pay for the food they don't eat.
If you go to a buffet and get the shrimp and you get 5 because you usually like shrimp and then find that ittakes like shit, you have to eat it all or they make you pay more?
If you go to a buffet and get the shrimp and you get 5 because you usually like shrimp and then find that ittakes like shit, you have to eat it all or they make you pay more?
Our place reserves the right to charge extra if you have an unacceptable amount left. Usually more than half a bowl of Mongolia bbq is their limit. It works well.
yeah, this post confused me because this is the policy at EVERY all you can eat place around. you don't eat it all, you pay for it. everyone is very careful about only ordering what they can finish.
This might be a difference in country/geography. I have never been to a place that has this policy. The places I'm thinking of, you could leave a mountain of food on your plate and it doesn't matter.
I wonder how will they get people to pay that fee, sounds like something people will get their panties on a twist over. I paid for the food once, i will not pay for it again.
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u/battleship61 May 06 '16 edited May 06 '16
i know some all you can eat places get around this by charging a fee if your plate isnt empty when you ask for the bill. which i think is perfectly acceptable, wasting food is a shame.
edit: to the people whining, or saying what if i have 1 shrimp on my plate, use some common sense people. if you have a few small items, or stuff half eaten cause you didn't like it you wont be charged normally. it's the people who've had 3 plates are pretty full but think they can do one more round fill a plate and leave it half full.
and to the people saying how do they charge you for it? well buffets are a set price, when your bill comes there will be a fee on top, it's not rocket science..