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Taken from another MB:
"There is no objective way to police which food selections people take from a buffet. It is up to the proprietors to come up with a pricing structure that results in a reasonable profit most of the time - with a buffet, you will win some and lose some, but if it is priced correctly, it will be profitable overall. There are no rules that say a patron must select a variety of different foods - if an item is included in the "all you can eat" buffet, then there is nothing to stop a patron from filling up on just that, unless there some sort of control mechanism.
For example, I've been to a buffet where most of the food was "all you can eat"; however, patrons were given a ticket that entitled them to a serving of certain high-priced items. For example, prime rib was served by a carver and the patron had to present the ticket they were given when they paid. Additional servings of prime rib would require the purchase of another ticket (for a nominal fee of $4.00 or something like that). That allowed the proprietor of the restaurant to control losses due to excess consumption of the most expensive items (but this procedure also added the overhead of having a full-time carver to dish out the servings). Unless the restaurant has something like this in place, there is no fair, objective way to try to charge a patron extra fees because they ate too much of any one thing.
Again, there is no objective way for restaurant staff to measure and regulate the amount of food left on a patron's plate. It's actually not uncommon for me to take normal portions, but somehow get very full half-way through a meal and have a lot of food left. I WISH somebody would try to make me pay an extra 20% for that. I mean, if someone is just piling up plate after plate with mountains of food they clearly have no intention of eating, that is behavior that can be challenged (just as restaurant staff can and do stop people's kids from playing in the food at the buffet) - but for the most part, all-you-can-eat places need to BUDGET for the "eyes bigger than your stomach" phenomenon and price accordingly. It's not rocket science to analyze average costs and average consumption and find a price that yields a reasonable profit most of the time. It is certainly not acceptable for restaurant staff to try to do an "eyeball guesstimate" on whether or not I ate enough of my food to avoid a surcharge.
It sounds like this place is poorly managed and they want to use their own personal judgement to determine how much is too much. Which will result in heated arguments every time (and that's leaving aside whether or not the waitress called them fat or not)."
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Hybrid Mode
