My good friend’s dad was a promanant food and beverage manager. He grasped the idea of putting a huge selection of cheap, but very good smelling*/tasting breads and salads in the most easily accessable places in the buffets he ran. Food cost dropped and revenues went up. He was widely sought-after and is still a “big wheel” around town. I used to drop his name when I needed summer jobs in school.
*Honestly, who can resist that “fresh-baked” bread smell? Rumor has it he somehow “pumped” it out to the people standing in line, but I don’t see how that could be.
Actually that’s a widely used trick. My father works in construction management and one of his projects was the renovation of a midwestern shopping mall. You better believe the HVAC is designed to blow the good smells outward, thus bringing more people in.
Here in deep South Texas, land of the Winter Texan, I have seen women take Baggies from their purses and fill them with food at the all you can eat buffet. These are not poor people. They are tourists who can afford a summer home and a winter home. They are greedy gluttons!
Not quite the same as a buffet, but in Sainsbury’s supermarkets you can fish out doughnuts, biskies, bakery items in general from bins in the store – a few months ago I was waiting for a guy to finish choosing a pastry, and he lost his grip on it, and it fell onto the dirty floor; he shrugged, picked it up, and put it back in the bin before choosing another variety. :eek:
He looked around quickly to see if anyone had noticed (quite a number of people did); I couldn’t help it, but blurted out, ‘Oh my God, that is so bloody grotty, you twit!’ and called over one of the employees…they binned the whole lot of that particular pastry, and the man gave me a filthy look!
It makes you wonder what else people have done…at least I can wash off fruit when I buy it from the shops.
Years ago, I was at Whiskey Pete’s, one of the casinos at the Nevada/California border. We noticed that they had a … get this… $1.99 all-you-can-eat buffet! Who could pass up a bargain like that? Well, I wish I had. All I remember is few indistinguishable meats, odd gravy, corn, rolls, mashed potatos, green beans, and a dessert bar with some assorted puddings and jellos that were all sort of co-mingling. I had some rolls and left. Anything else, I feel I would have been putting my life in danger.
Now, the Rio, on the other hand, has one of the best buffets that I have ever attended. The food was tasty, shrimp were in abundance, and the dessert selection was simply terrific. It was, I believe $26.
My brother says he and his fam were admonished by Klingons recently at the hotel’s gift shop; they told him not to buy “that Federation garbage” but to stick with the Klingon merchandise. How Ferengi of them.
Back to the OP: I was at a CA casino today and noticed that in the buffet, the clientele–most of whom are seniors–tend not to pile it on too much, and they generally finish whatever they do take.
My grandparents own a vacation house in McAllen, Texas, and the woman was a neighbor lady, and a friend of my grandmother.
We went out to a buffet place one afternoon. She wanted to go at an exact certain time, because, she informed my grandmother and I once we got there, it was when they switched over from breakfast to lunch, so you could eat breakfast, then eat lunch and only pay for one meal.
She asked the waitress for extra butter packets, but she only used one, and squirreled the rest away in her volumous handbag. She also emptied the jelly containers, and took all of the sugar packets. I was moritified. Before we left, she grabbed some rolls from the buffet and wrapped them in a napkin. I mentioned that there were signs posted specifically forbidding this, to which she replied with a baleful glare: “But I paid for it!”
Mind you, this woman was rich. As in so-rich-she-couldn’t-possibly-ever-spend-it-all-even-if-she-tried rich. (Mind you, she’d never spend a cent more than was absolutely necessary to survive.)
In her home, she had drawers full of these condiment packets. I don’t even think she ate jelly-- she was diabetic…
One might suppose she got rich through these miserly ways, but if that’s what it takes, I prefer to stay the way I am. At least I’m happy-- she wasn’t.
Butter packets in her PURSE? Wouldn’t it melt and make a mess? That’s disgusting!
The looks better than it tastes-this is easily solved by simply taking a small sample of things you haven’t tried yet before, (a bite size portion), and simply then going back for more if you like it.
Some of you may have been describing my grandmother. She passes away two years ago and when we went to clean out her house we found a couple hundred of those jelly packs in her refrigerator, a drawer about half full of sugar, sweetener, and creamer packets, and a cabinet almost full of napkins. I swear she must have been stashing everything she could from wherever she ate. She wasn’t rich, but she certainly wasn’t hurting for money either.
They were the kind that are plastic on the bottom, and foil on the top-- they shouldn’t leak, but I’m sure they probably melted.
I doubt if she used them anyway. Like P_T_'s grandmother, she had a ton of them in her fridge, and big plastic baggies full of the jellies in her kitchen drawers.
Your quote reminds me of an old, old SNL skit where the premise was a chili restauraunt… with the chili served in troughs. It was the best chili in town, and people were lined up to get a spot at the trough. Every once in a while the staff would come thru with hoses and spray you down with beer.
My buffet peeve is the rudeness of the people getting at the food. I go to SoupPlantation a couple times a month, and when I visit my parents in North Carolina, my Dad likes Golden Corral buffet because they do have good food.
Anyway, you can’t just walk thru a buffet. People are darting out in front of you without looking, changing direction suddenly without looking, stopping suddenly in front of you without looking… they’re fixated on the food and could care less if they cause a collision.
Worse, they don’t have any concept of waiting their turn for food. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stood at the soup pots in SoupPlantation politely waiting for a little old lady or a child to get their soup, obviously waiting for my turn, only to have rude adults who all should know better swoop in at the first sign that the old lady is about to put down the ladle.
It’s even worse when we go to the one in Arcadia, which has apparently fallen behind the Yellow Line.
I’m not racist, but living in SoCal you soon learn that Asian culture has a completely different standard for acceptable public behavior. To Americans, it’s downright rude.
My grandmother was what we called “careful”. She was born in 1911 on Beals Island, Maine. They had no electic power, no telephones, no telegraph, no anything. Fresh water, fuel oil, coal, lamp oil, flour, bacon, and fruit and vegetables (in season) had to be shipped out from the mainland almost daily. Her family could buy this stuff at the dock market when they had the money, which they usually didn’t. Fishermen never get wealthy, and they were dirt poor to the point where the Depression didn’t make much of an impact.
She married my grandfather and moved to Portland, where he managed to scrape up a living in constuction. Then WW II started, and he went to work in the Bath Iron Works, building destroyers for the Navy. After the war, she got a job with the school district to make ends meet while he got back into construction. He died in 1960, just six months after his only daughter (my mother) got married, from heart failure. My grandmother was alone then, with no one to help her.
When I was a kid, we all understood that Grammie had her little economies. It wasn’t until I grew up that I understood how uncertain her early life was, and how afraid she must have been.
I’m not singling out P_T_ here or criticizing him or other posters. I’m just saying that some of those older people grew up in another world, quite different from ours, and maybe we should cut them a little slack.
That’s when I say, “Excuse me, I was next.” I’ve never yet had a confrontation over it, but dreamer is right, it may get me killed. I could be dramatic and say it’s a cause worth dying for: to call people on their rudeness, and hopefully make a better world, but I’m not going that far.
Your post made me think of what happened when Hubby and I went to Niagra Falls a few years ago.
We were in the tunnel under the falls, waiting to get up to the rail at the opening to look out. People kept darting foward, out of the line, up to the view, so the line itself wasn’t really moving, because only a few people were actually using the line. I could see my husband getting more and more irritated as people began to do it more blatantly, even to the point of shoving past others. One woman who was third back in the line kept getting nudged further and further back from the view. Not being agressive enough to stand her ground, she looked very upset.
"YOU!"Hubby bellowed, pointing to a man who had just shoved his way to the front. “Get back in line! You, too, lady! All of you, against the wall! Get back in line and wait your turn!”
It was amazing. Like the Red Sea parting before Moses, the people rushed back to their places in line. Silence decended. Whereas before the chamber had echoed with voices, laughter and shrieking, it was now quiet, broken only by the occasional murmur.
I should mention, I suppose that my Hubby is 6’4" and built like a football player. He also works in a prison, so he’s used to producing the Booming Voice Of Authority. It worked. The line was still nice and orderly when we left.
Unless I’m in a foul mood to begin with I try not to make a big deal out of something that is inconsequential in the long term. On the other hand the fact that I remember this woman so well after nearly a year must say something.
There are a lot of exceptions to this. Still…I have a friend, P, whose parents and grandparents were like this. They would never dine out or go shopping without coupons, always started talking about food to take home as soon as it was put in front of them, agonized over every penny even though they weren’t hurting for money in their senior years, etc.
The behavior was made worse by the fact that some of this is obsessive-compulsive. These people hoarded stuff in their fridge, freezer, cupboards, shelves, etc. like you wouldn’t believe–and not just food. I refuse to go into their house any more.
These people are hoarders. Now I can understand some of it to a certain extent. My Grandma watches her money closely, grows a garden, hardly eats out etc etc (She would’ve been under ten for the 30’s if I figure it correctly) but she doesn’t hoard things… well maybe cloth but she uses it to make stuff. Neither does Great Grandma and she had a young family to care for at that time.
It’s one thing to keep the packets dropped in take out for later use, it’s another to go into a restaurant and take all the packets on the table… especially as in the case of Lissa’s example where she probably wouldn’t ever eat the jelly anyway because of diabetes.
I cut them slack yes, it’s understandable to want to watch their money but there’s a difference between being careful, being cheap and being compulsive. Being careful != cheap and/or compulsive. I wouldn’t mention it if I was working somewhere, but I certainly wouldn’t refill the packets while that person sat at the table.
