There are plenty of jokes about all you can eat restaurants. Unfortunately, they all apparently came true for a couple who had to close their restaurant when they ended up $80,000 in debt because patrons ate too much.
In order to attract business and build up loyal customers, the new restaurant Jiamener offered an all you can eat special for $19 for the whole month of June. As you can imagine, this made the restaurant immediately popular. These customers were coming to the hot pot restaurant for all of their meals.
This is a huge risk as you are essentially inviting Jabba the Hutt to sit down and eat you out of house and home for an entire month for the low cost of $19. There was no way this was going to end well!
Restrictions weren’t put upon the membership cards that were sold, so people were passing them off to friends and family members to get their fill as well. For two weeks, about 500 people came in to eat. Some people actually stayed and ate all day!
In addition to the immense cost of feeding 500 people daily, Su Jie and Wang Mengfan had to pay their workers for long hours. The owners claim the Chengdu, China restaurant was in such demand, they were only able to sleep a couple hours a day before having to prepare for the arrival of the next day’s gluttons.
In just two weeks of running this promotion, Jiamener had racked up $80,000 in debt, forcing the restaurant to close. The customers had eaten Su and Wang right out of business. Hundreds of people abused the all you can eat offer by feasting in incredible fashion, but Su takes responsibility for that poor marketing decision.
“The uncivilized behavior of the diners was secondary – the main problem was our poor management,” he said.
As with everything, moderation is key. If these people hadn’t abused this generous offer, they likely could still be enjoying the food. Just because you can eat everything in sight doesn’t mean you should!
Source: Western Journal
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