I find it amusing that this argument is about an incident that happened in a restaurant at some time between 33 and 41 years ago.
Your guess is worth whatever you choose to think it is - or whatever your audience may choose, as the case may be. Somebody told me that once. 
jjimm, thats a good observation. I wonder what minor incidences in our lives today will trigger discussions by bored people in like 2050?
I think there is room between the Clean Your Plate syndrom and the increadible piggishness of this woman’s spawn. Children should try stuff at a buffet, and may not finish things, but they should never be alowed to take as much as is discribed. Curbing their greed is a parents job. The grownups should not have to play garbage disposal; small amounts food can be left on the plate. There is a difference between taking one eggroll, taking a bite out of it, and leaving it, and taking four eggrolls and taking that same bite.
And apparently, they went repeatedly. You know, my kids DO develop a taste for things over time - something we encourage so they aren’t 40 years old and have a diet of Twinkies, McDonalds and Mac n cheese. But if they’ve NEVER liked egg rolls before, I don’t know why they’d take them this time. If you throw away the egg rolls every time you go, you are either guilty of waste, or you have the world’s flattest learning curve. In neither case do I want you to patronize my all you can eat buffet.
Plus I believe the manager said that not only would they take four eggrolls and crab rangoon and throw most of it away, then they would go back and get the same thing again!
Wasting crab rangoon should be considered a capital crime.
I tend to agree with this. I can see the restaurant’s frustration, and the customers didn’t really endear themselves to me by their waste of food, but I also think that if you get into that business, you know there will be a small percentage of customers who will somehow or other abuse the system, and that must be well-known not just to the proprietors, but the entire industry, and I’m sure they’ve got it down to a pretty exact science, and they have this factored in to the cost of the meals.
Also it’s not as though the restaurants don’t play the game either. Every all-you-can-eat place I’ve ever set foot in has the bulky, cheap, kid-friendly stuff like hot potato chips, pizza, etc all at the front, so it’s the first thing you see when you arrive hungry with an empty plate, and all the seafood and so on is hidden down the back in the hope that you might not get that far. So it’s a system open to tactical selfishness on both sides.
FYI TheLoadedDog, what you quoted was a comment I made not about the wasters in the OP, but A.R. Cane’s situation.
My parents were born in '26, so wasting food was a household felony when I was growing up. It just Wasn’t Done. I was definitely conditioned to clean my plate, but also never to take more than I wanted. I’m completely on the side of the restaurant on this one. It’s just not that difficult of a concept.
I’ve never been thrown out of an all-you-can-eat place for eating too much, even when I was a teenager with an absolutely monstrous need for fuel. (I grew 9.5 inches in less than 2 years.) Every all-you-can-eat place I’ve been to assumes there is going to be a certain number of teenage boys and other high-capacity customers. There are plenty more who only eat a single plate of food who will make up for it.
I used to talk this petite coworker of mine to come to the buffet with us, and she would eat like Kate Moss with the stomach flu. I’m sure they made some money off her.
I had a coworker whose thoughts on buffets was, ‘Steaming troughs of food! ugh’
Well, there’s room for a little wastage. If you take some of the kung pao and decide you don’t like it there’s nothing wrong with leaving that part and going back for more roast beef.
EVERYONE does that at buffets; a little wastage is common, and it’s always going to happen with children. If the family cited in the OP was kicked out, I suspect that what was going on was gluttonous, massive wastage - several plates of food wasted on every trip to the buffet. The linked story likely did not fully capture the extent of waste that was going on. No buffet restaurant is going to notice or care if you just didn’t quite polish off everything on your plate. If they noticed these people, it was a grotesque wastage.
The capacity for some people to act like scum-sucking filth at buffets never fails to amaze me. 98% of people act like decent humans, but 1% seem to think it’s funny to take away eleven pounds of food and waste it, and another 1% seem to think it’s okay to demand that two adults “split” one buffet charge.
I, for one, prefer not to pay extra for jerks like these and would rather patronize a buffet that kicks people like that out.
The person that eats a small amount is not analogous here. The key factor is choice- the person with a small appetite makes the choice to go to a buffet, knowing full well what they are getting in to. We would all agree, for example, that a workplace that forced all of it’s employees to eat lunch- even those dieting, etc.- at a buffet would be unfair.
But a buffet cannot choose who walks in their doors and does not know what they are getting in to until the damage is done. The only way they can exersize choice is to kick abusers out and ban them.
Now, many buffets are unabashed glopfests that are restocked with an endless supply of cheap Sysco frozen dishes and it really doesn’t matter how much you eat. But there are a few very high quality buffets from restaurants that are on occassion able to offer a large variety of food at a reasonable price thanks to the economies of scale. When people abuse the system, they have a very hard choice- decrease the quality of food, raise prices, or shut down the buffet. I really treasure these places, so I hate to see a few jerks ruining it.
Absolutely. I love buffets because they **encourage **kids to try new things without fear of getting yelled at for not finishing. But that means you take only a mouthful or two of each type of food, and go back for more of it if you liked your sample. If not, go ahead and leave it and try something else.
Last week was the first time I noticed a notice on the receipt of our local Chinese buffet with the words “This restaurant is all you can eat, not all you can waste.” They went on to say that a fine of up to $50 would be charged for excessive food wasting. Apparently, my too-dry Teriyaki Chicken, WhyKid’s failed octopus experiment (he finally got up the nerve to try it, but the sauce was too spicy!) and the 1/2 cup of white rice wasn’t enough to garner us a fine.
There are a small number of customers in any system that you don’t want…but you don’t HAVE to keep them. If you run a retail clothing store and you have a customer who regularly returns clothes with sweat stains on them, complaining of a pulled thread - ban them. If you run a bar and regularly have a customer that harasses your waitstaff and other customers - tell him he isn’t welcome. If you run a salon and have a client that only shows up for one appointment in four - and makes them during prime Saturday afternoon hours - tell them they’d be happier at Cost Cutters where appointments aren’t necessary.
Maybe when abusers get the message that doing business with someone is not an entitlement, they’ll catch on and won’t abuse. But at very least, if companies had a backbone regarding the abusers, the non-abusing customers wouldn’t be inconvienced by the behavior or pay more to make up for it.
Grrrrr. I hate to say it, but dammit-- only in America. Who do so many people in this country feel like being wasteful is their God-given right–or worse, duty?? I’m so tired of seeing things like this and feeling like I’m in the only country on earth where people are so flagrantly disrespectful and unappreciative of the foods and resources we’re given on a daily basis. Another example: when I see people taking 400 paper towels (or pressing the towel dispenser lever 50 times) in the bathroom just so they can dry their hands. God, I want to physically hurt people like that. :mad:
Dang. I used to love buffets. LOVE them. That was when I was in my 20s and early 30s. Now I’m 39. Last time I went to a buffet I finished one plate of food and felt STUFFED. I pretty much had to go back for one more plate, or I couldn’t look myself in the face, but I could only get just one more helping of one particularly good item. What does it matter if you can see your shoes if you can’t look yourself in the face.
I remember manys the time I would stagger out of Sizzlers, so full to the brim from the buffet that the sight of people eating disgusted me, and ready to hurl at the slightest provocation.
Sigh. Good times.
I apologize if someone already pointed this out and I missed it, but…
Your friend is ripping off a well known comedy bit and almost certainly didn’t really get thrown out of a buffet.
I just remembered a time in college my friends and I went to an Argentinian restaurant that had an all-you-can eat meat course. When we arrived, the hostess took a look at the seven of us and said “We’re going to lose money on this, aren’t we?” To which we grinned and replied, “Yep!”
Still, we didn’t completely pig out, and definitely didn’t waste food (couldn’t, actually. They’d grill up one type of meat after another and come around the table with a huge skewer serving out portions. You got skipped if there was still food on your plate). We ended up only going there once since it was a bit over our starving student budget ($17 a person), but man was it good.
I can’t remember the name, but it was in Cambridge on Mass Ave., in the vicinity of St. Paul’s church between Harvard Square and Central Square.
Could very well be but he told this story many years ago (around 15 years ago), named the restaurant at the time and it was backed up by the other person supposedly told to leave. Also knowing these two guys they very well could have eaten the place out of chicken wings.