When I was a kid I always wondered if AYCE buffets were allowed to charge pregnant women extra.
(me too, jayjay)
I assume that lunchtime buffets, like Pizza Hut’s mentioned in the OP, attract quite a few workers on their lunch hour, for whom the attraction is not so much the opportunity to pig out as it is the chance to eat fast, without waiting for their food to be ordered, prepared, and brought out. They won’t gorge themselves because they need to get back to work soon, and they don’t want to spend the afternoon sitting around moaning with their pants unfastened when they get there.
There’s an all you can eat sushi place near Times Square. The way it works is you can place 4 orders. You can’t place your next order until you finish the last one and you get charged for whatever you can’t finish. So the best thing to do is order, say 20 pieces or whatever you know you can finish and then smaller amounts to top off the tank.
I’d say there’s nothing healthy about the type of appetite that would cause an all-you-can-eat buffet to lose money.
A couple of years ago, a couple in Utah were asked to leave a buffet-style restaurant for eating too much roast beef. They were on the Atkins diet. The AP article said, “Isabelle Leota, 29, and her husband Sui Amaama, 26, both on the no-carb diet, were dining Tuesday at a Chuck-A-Rama in the Salt Lake City suburb of Taylorsville when the manager cut them off because they’d eaten too much roast beef.” Later, the restaurant apologized, although they claim that the restaurant was not all you can eat and the husband was going after his twelfth slice of beef.
There is this rather new Chinese Buffet a few miles from my house. It is huge and the thing that gets me is that they intermingle lots of real seafood in with the standard Chinese dishes. They even have a shuck on demand raw oyster bar that is pretty good.
We took my FIL there out for his birthday last Sunday along with 10 other people. Now, our entire family consists of seafood fiends. We were in luck that night. They were putting out huge trays of freshly cooked King Crab and Snow Crab legs as well as boiled shrimp and a few other kinds of cooked shrimped. We basically treated the place like it was a seafood only buffet and ignored everything else. We each ate at least 4 large plates of crab legs, a dozen oysters or so, and whatever else seemed like a good deal. I was scared somebody was gong to kick us out because the piles of crab shells got to be ridiculous but they never did.
The whole thing was $132 for all of us which is pretty impressive for a 2 hour seafood feast for 11 people. I have no idea how they make money like that.
“Fuck off, I’m full.”
“Boot eet’s just WAFFER theen!”
I remember when Furr’s Cafeteria went to AYCE, rather than pay by item. One night, two friends and I decided to do them in. We went, and we ate, and reordered, and ate again. And man, did we put it away. By the time we stopped, among the three of us, we had 44 empty plates on the table. My friend EJ had eaten three full turkey dinners. OH, it was nuts.
This was, of course, back when I was in high school, and had that teenage metabolism to back me up. Thing was, we’d probably gotten more than we’d paid for, but I doubt we were more than a momentary blip on their radar. Food just doesn’t cost that much to a restaurant.
Like a previous poster wrote, most places in Japan have a time limit.
In Tokyo, the local all-you-can-eat shabu-shabu (beef cooked in a Japanese hotpot) restaurants usually have a 90-minute time limit, which is usually enough for most people.
The all-you-can-eat yakiniku (Korean BBQ) places are the same, but they charge for excessive waste.
The difference is that these places are usually self-service, while in shabu-shabu/sukiyaki restaurants, measured portions are served plate at a time.
The California restaurant, Shakey’s Pizza, has a few outlets in the city. They offer all-you-can-eat pizza, spaghetti, mojo potatoes and curry with rice. All for about US$7.00 and no time limit. 
I’ve worked in resturaunts most of my life and I can tell you the mark up on food is enormous. All you can eat buffets are specifically geared to simple to make dishes, we encourage people to eat bread and lettuce, and other cheap things to fill up. Look at the dishes simple roasts and simple chicken, nothing fancy is ever served.
When I first started out a McDonalds as a teen a small coke costs us 9¢, when we “supersized it” our costs when to 14¢ (remember that is just the syrup as the cup has been accounted for). Fries are another enourmous profit. If McDonalds sold just burgers they’d be much less profitable.
There are almost no waitresses so that saves on staff. People rarely eat one of an item and we calculate the cost. The only thing we would ever really object to is stuffing it in your purse or two people sharing a buffet, but sometimes we let that slide.
I let older people stuff their purses and pockets, we come out fine. To make a fuss would be deadly. I live in Chicago and there are SO many other places to eat if we kicked someone out the word would spread and no one would eat our buffet, they’d go elsewhere and the competition would capitalize off the publicity.
That’s why I have never heard of anyone actually doing this in my whole career. Seems everyone “says” they hear about it but can’t pin it down.
We have a Dilbert cartoon where Dilbert went to an “all you can eat” place and left food on his plate. The waiter says “Well sir were gonna have to charge you extra because you purposely took more than you could eat.” Dilbert says “Help Dogbert.” Dogbert replies “The sign says all you CAN eat not all you DID it.”
“Ooh … this guy’s good.”
And with Dilbert on the table (heh!), recall that Dilbert’s dad doesn’t appear in the strip because he’s still at the same AYCE restaurant he’s been at for over ten years. He hasn’t yet eaten all he could, you see …
Yes and no,
IME food costs in fast food/pizza run around 20%
then labor about 20%
facilities about 20%
all the other misc crap 20%
profit about 20%
So its not like Mcdonalds is pocketing $0.80 of that $0.99 double chesseburger. Its more like $0.15-$0.20 if that.
Throw in a mistake or a waste and the profit margin for the next 4-5 burgers goes out the window. It may sound like the 3x-5x markup you see between a grocery store and a restaraunt meal is a fountain of profit. If it was you would not see restaraunts being one of the most failure prone businesses in existence.
About time limits - I once went to an AYCE breakfast buffet and stayed for 3 hours. I didn’t feel bad, and I don’t think anyone wanted to kick us out - after all, they were charging $85 per person. What I’m saying is, like anything else in life, it just depends.
I’ve been to the casino in Connecticut, Foxwoods.
The buffet fee was, I think, about $6.00 and you could keep on eating as long as you wanted.
We were there almost 12 hours, lost a lot of money but boy did we eat good.
Back home in England we don’t seem to have these eat all you want joints, if we do I aint seen one.
An AYCE restaurant also figured in an episode of Hill Street Blues. IIRC, the job of hauling the lardbucket in question to the station landed on Hill and Renko.
That’s the one where the guy rolled his chair up to the buffet and just slid back and forth, right?
Hill and Renko could hardly get him out the door.
That Simpsons episode played out here in Australia a week or so ago. Unfortunately, it’s slipped from the newspaper websites, so I can’t link to it. Essentially, a large, gluttonous guy goes to one of those places and starts gorging himself. On his umpteenth plate, the manager cuts off service and asks him to leave. Guy threatens to sue… I don’t know how it played out in the end.
I do find the psychology of those places interesting though. Just like supermarkets have the staples of bread, milk, eggs, etc at the very back and all the expensive value-added crap you don’t need (magazines, chocolates, toys, etx) around the checkouts, the all you can eat places confront the hungry newcomer with the very first racks containing cheap-to-produce crap like potato chips, pizza slices, rice dishes, and kiddy food, and the seafood and whatnot is waaaaay off in the distance.
Would that work?
If waste plates build up on my table, I have no problem carrying them to a nearby empty table so that restaurant staff can clear them from there.
In my personal experience as a big, fat man who occasionally eats to the point where he is ill afterwards and occasionally embarasses his dinner partners, I have YET to have anyone at a buffet restaurant complain to me in any fashion.
Red Lobster brings their “all you can eat” shellfish items out in niggardly fashion after the first serving, but that is, as other posters have noted, not exactly the same thing.
Two of my favorite places (all you can eat blue claw crabs) have time limits of two hours.
Most businesses can refuse service as they see fit, and the customer is left with little recourse, unless the customer was refused because they were refused based on a protected class issue. Restaurant mgmnt can ask wasters to leave, and this would be a common reason in the buffet service world relative to the other reasons.
There is an implied service, and a common sense to the law…or an implied agreement between patron and restaurant. What would reasonable mgrs and patrons do? A reasonable patron would not waste alot of food (realtive) and linger to the detrimnet of the restaurant and other patrons. Since so few people can manage to eat to the point that they can eat for more than 2-3 plus hours, each restaurant mgr knows this is just a tiny fraction of the public, and can take such ‘losses’ on the chin.
The return on invesment of having a big buffet of AYCE is reduce wait staff, no menu per se to manage, rapid kitchen prep and actually a fair am’t of rapid turnover, as seated patrons are not left to wait for food to cook, for appetizers to be delivered, for the dessert cart to come around. Buffet overhead is lower and patron turnover is HIGHER - believe it or not.
One of my friends owns a sushi place in Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. His food cost for one piece of tuna sushi (let’s say maguro) is $0.25. The more sophisticated AYCEs, like Todai (an AYCE sushi joint), employ very good management techniques, and have great buying leverage, such that it will be very, very difficult for them not to take a profit. And, remember, for all those gluttons out there, there are much more normal eaters.
Also, typically (I’m sure that there are a ton of exceptions) these places have terrible food. If it was any good at any time, it isn’t now because it’s been sitting around for a while.
My friend’s technique – and while dense (i.e. mass), he’s not fat, but can eat a ton – is to size up what you’re going to eat before against that restaurant’s menu. Typically, try to eat 6 times the AYCE price based on the menu price (this is to take into account all the other costs of running a restaurant). So, e.g. if the AYCE price is $10, try to eat $60 worth of roast beef. Try to hit all the items that they are outsourced (not on the regular menu) because that it is a higher cost to the restaurant. Eat all those things that require more labor (like omlette stations, carving stations, dessert making stations). Do not eat soda (or anything carbonated), bread, lettuce, or most things from the salad bar (including soups, unless guaranteed homemade). Also, eat those things that aren’t in season, or are hard to get in your area (typically seafood, but be forwarned, it could be bad or of bad quality).