Break the Curse of All-You-Can-Eat Buffets

Do you have a favourite restaurant? That cheap and cheerful burger place around the corner? The rustic Italian trattoria in the city centre? The ayurvedic yoga snack shack? Or how about that all-you-can-eat buffet-style restaurant with a seemingly endless choice of food and bottomless refills?

Who doesn't love a rich food buffet?

Source: Kelly Jean/Unsplash

Personally, I rather like the culinary variety of buffets, and I enjoy the freedom to pick just the food items I want. This way I can avoid the raw onions in mixed salads or selectively choose the cheesiest pizza slice. I also love being able to mix and match different types of starters, mains, and desserts. Whoever thinks that Indian curry doesn’t go with Chinese stir-fry and a side of guacamole is probably right, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the chance to try it!

However, while buffet restaurants can be great options for many reasons, they often lead people to overeat. With unlimited amounts of food and a multitude of different dishes to try, it’s certainly tempting to keep re-filling that plate. In a recent post, I examined how the environment of a meal can influence our eating habits, and all-you-can-eat buffets are amongst the most challenging contexts to navigate when trying to eat healthily. The constant visibility of food presents a strong sensory trigger, which—combined with a noisy, distracting surrounding—can easily induce you to consume larger portion sizes and unhealthier dishes than normal.

Money matters

What is more, the way we pay for visiting a buffet restaurant often presents an additional, quite unexpected factor influencing how much food we pile up on our plates. The way people think about money isn’t always entirely rational, and one recurrent experimental finding is that people pay a lot of attention to the context and timing of financial expenditures.

During restaurant visits, customers typically pay right before or immediately after the meal. This creates a strong temporal association between the food consumed and the money paid. With the price therefore being salient in the consumer’s mind, it is all too natural to evaluate the respective meal in the context of its cost. Prudent financial decision-makers typically strive to get a “good deal,” thus trying to increase the subjective value gained from financial transactions (behavioural economists also call this “transaction utility”).

Applying this concept to buffet restaurants, consumers may be tempted to mentally sum the costs of their consumed food items and keep eating until they’ve had their money’s worth: To increase transaction utility, buffet customers may eat larger portions than usual, even if this leads them to feel uncomfortably full, bloated, or even sick.

Interestingly, however, the impact of a “good deal” mentality may depend on the specific buffet context. It is likely to be more powerful for expensive buffet deals, where customers have to eat larger portions to reach the food value they paid for. Another context is buffets with unexpectedly low food quality, where restaurant guests feel scammed by disappointing meal options. Rather counterintuitively, this can lead people to consume larger quantities of food, because they try to make up for the bad deal received.

Break the buffet curse

The way we think about money can present a powerful human bias, but it is possible to counteract irrational reasoning about all-you-can-eat-buffets by mentally separating the payment from the meal received. More specifically, you can achieve this by paying buffet costs in advance or by “hiding” individual meal prices within a bigger lump-sum payment. An example of this includes advance hotel bookings where guests pay an overall, fixed price several weeks prior to their stay, which subsequently provides them with all-inclusive access to a range of hotel facilities and services including rich breakfast and dinner buffets. The dissociation between the money paid and the buffet food consumed, thus impedes unwelcome influences of irrational financial reasoning on food choices. Furthermore, researchers found that products paid for in advance often feel “free” when consumed, which makes the experience all the more enjoyable. Paying for your food in advance could, therefore, be a win-win option.

There is nothing wrong with enjoying a lavish buffet dinner, but next time you might want to consider the complex consequences of seemingly unrelated factors such as payment context.