For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, my X feed is full of people discussing ‘hacks’ on how to get access to a hotel breakfast buffet without paying for it. Inevitably there are others explaining how to get the best out of your breakfast buffet and how to choose from the items on display.
Ah, the hotel buffet!
For lots of people, the buffet is almost too good to be true. You pay a fixed rate and can then eat EVERYTHING without having to pay extra. Six helpings of biryani? Sure. That is your right. Twelve different desserts? Of course! Help yourself!
This sounds like an incredibly good deal for the customer till you ask yourselves the obvious question: If buffets are a huge benefit for customers then why are hotels so keen on them? Hoteliers love nothing as much as they love a buffet. Give them a chance and they will put buffets everywhere.
Would they really do that if buffets were such good value for customers?
Well, the answer is obvious, isn’t it?
From a hotel’s point of view, the buffet successfully exploits the difference between appearance and human capacity. And it exploits this difference to the benefit of the hotel.
Most buffets are all about appearance. Guests are so thrilled to see so many dishes on offer that they forget that they have only one stomach. Nobody who goes to a buffet actually eats much more than they would eat if they had ordered à la carte. It’s not just that our capabilities are limited. It is also that buffets are incredibly inconvenient. You have to leave your table, walk across the room to a buffet table and wait (usually) till there is nobody helping themselves from the serving dish with the nice chicken curry you desired. Then you need to fit as much as you can on the plate and walk back to your table trying not to spill any of the food on your plate. You will probably go back for dessert, but for most people that’s it. If they do go back for second helpings, it will be for a small serving of one or two dishes. Hardly anyone fills an entire plate the second time around.
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So, think about it. Yes, you could have eaten 80 different dishes. But in reality, you may even have eaten less than you would have had if you had ordered a three-course meal. Hotels know this. So, they are happy to give the impression of abundance while watching you consume a relatively modest amount of food.
That’s how they make money on buffets.
There’s more to it than that, of course. Imagine normal service at a restaurant. Guests will order a variety of dishes from the à la carte menu. The kitchen will have to be equipped (in terms of raw ingredients) to cook every dish on the menu quickly enough so that guests don’t complain. Waiters will be required to serve them, and if it is a table of four then at least two waiters will be needed to carry the food to the table.
Now, imagine serving at a buffet. The menu will be decided days in advance so only the exact number of ingredients required will be purchased. The food does not need to be cooked to order. It will be made hours in advance; sometimes even the night before. Guests serve themselves, so you only need waiters to clear dirty plates.
Guests feel that they have lots of choices at the buffet but they don’t realize that they actually have much more choice on the à la carte menu. At a buffet they have to eat what the chef wants them to eat. And if you added up the number of dishes on the buffet, it would be much less than the number of options on the à la carte.
This is why restaurants love buffets.
And they can manipulate you in subtle ways. They can use smaller-than-normal plates so you can’t take too much food at a time. They know that people who come to a buffet are usually greedy and will start serving themselves the moment they get to a buffet table. So, they fill the start of the buffet with rubbish cold salads in the hope of filling you up. Even when you get to the main courses, the high cost items will be placed further into the section to ensure that by the time guests reach them, they have already filled their plates with low cost items.
Restaurants have had decades to master buffet psychology and they know that for most guests a display of abundance trumps quality or freshness.
The breakfast buffet follows the same basic principles. Yes, it’s exciting to see idlis, pancakes and fried eggs on the buffet and to know that you are entitled to eat ALL of them. But hotels know that rare is the man (or woman) who will put an idli on top of a fried egg and then cover the whole thing with a pancake. Most people choose a single option and possibly munch on a bakery product of some kind. Bakery products cost next to nothing to make and even the egg/idli/pancake options are low cost.
So yes, they can afford to be generous with breakfast buffets. Even the live counters (eggs, dosas etc) are designed so that you always have to wait till the chef clears the backlog and gets to your order. So, you may end up avoiding the queue and choose a ready option from the buffet. Which, of course, is the whole idea.
Now think of the alternative: Suppose the hotel offered an à la carte breakfast. Wouldn’t you rather have a chef in the kitchen send out freshly made buttery scrambled eggs or a plate of steaming idlis?
Yes, you probably would and to service the demands of guests ordering freshly made breakfasts, the hotel would have to double the number of waiters and quadruple the number of chefs. So, they much prefer the breakfast buffet.
They love the Sunday brunch buffet too. Because brunch is meant to be a cross between breakfast and lunch, they can serve the low-cost items of the breakfast buffet and add only a few main course items. And they can charge as much as they charge for a full lunch buffet.
Next time you go to one of those brunches, look at the buffet tables. You will see guests lining up at the egg station and you will see hoteliers beaming with joy. Those will be the most overpriced eggs the hotel will sell all week.
So. I while I do enjoy reading the ‘hacks’ that will get you to the breakfast buffet for less (or free, even) I always marvel at the way the hotels have sold us the myth of the buffet as a desirable option.
