This is just ludicrous. Sometimes managers just don’t get it:
I was at a breakfast meeting this morning at a breakfast buffet at nice casual dining restaurant. There was the usual fare: pancakes, eggs (from powder – yuck), french toast, sausages, ham, hash browns, assorted breads / pastries, juice, and coffee. Conspicuously missing from that list is the quintessential breakfast item: bacon.
We’re told that bacon has to be requested from the kitchen and you only get one serving. An extra serving costs more (a serving is 5 or 6 slices we find out). Because we had to request it, we asked for a full serving for every person at the table, yet we all agreed that normally we would have only taken 3 or maybe 4 slices of bacon from the buffet.
I’m guessing one day a manager or chef looked at the cost breakdown for the buffet and figured they were spending too much on bacon. Looking at those kind of details is good business. But hiding and restricting bacon in a breakfast buffet is narrow-sighted to the point of being asinine. Like it or not, bacon is a standard breakfast menu item. Failing to have it in the buffet is jarring to the customer because it breaks firmly held expectations (i.e., the customer’s mental model or schema of what makes up a breakfast buffet).
Even worse than not meeting expectations is the server having to bring it to the attention of every customer and thus make the company look desperate (trying to shave a few cents off a $10 visit), which leaves customers wondering what other corners are being cut (i.e., reduced trust / confidence in the company).
Local restaurants rely on word-of-mouth marketing. Breaking expectations, looking desperate, and losing trust can have a real impact on the bottom line if people stop showing up to eat. And that is bad business.