Comment by abruzzi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abruzzi | Hacker News Reader

> According to an experiment conducted by Dr. Brian Wansink of Cornell University, sales increase almost thirty percent when menu items are accompanied by a well-written description. Diners also gave these items more favorable feedback and felt more satisfied after eating them.

This is interesting to me. Yes, these are sales techniques and the primary benefactor is the restaurant because they make more profit. But if the diner felt more satisfied after eating the better described food, is it also providing a benefit to the diner by subconsciously helping them enjoy the meal more? (nb: I haven't looked at the study to see if the article is accurately representing what it said.)

(I can also say that the only time I have eaten at a restaurant with these kind of prices was in the late 90s when I was doing a website for one. They gave me free meals when I did the work on site, so I got to enjoy some expensive meals that were outside my budget. It was quite nice, but in the end I'm a $10 meal kind of person.)

I remember when this trend started years ago. All of a sudden every restaurant (particularly in the fast casual category) started adding farm names and artisanal this or hand-crafted that. It was all still the same old frozen bulk goods and the quality didn't change at all. The only thing that changed was they marked up the price.

Then during the recession another worrying trend started--appetizer prices started climbing dramatically to the point where they weren't really that much cheaper than a main course. I recall reading something around how this was in response to people trying to cut back significantly on restaurant spending by just ordering appetizers instead of an entree.

These days it seems like the fastest growing item in terms of cost is drinks. Toss some powdered drink mix or syrup into a glass with mostly ice and water, call it something exotic like "Refreshing organic passion fruit spritzer" and charge $4 for it.

I remember eating at Oola in SF once and wondering what "hand-cut kennebeck potatos" would look like. The answer: just regular old french fries.

The idea that "hand-made" is somehow better never made sense to me. I can understand it for a sculpture or painting where the feelings of the artist are supposed to show through, but for chopping food, picking fruit, sewing clothes, or assembling furniture? Either machines can't yet compete with humans so "hand-made" just means "normal" or the human is going to do more inconsistent and unhygienic job than a machine.

I've had hand- and freshly-cut fries at a lot of places that to my taste don't stack up to McDonald's. (To be clear, I mostly despise McDonald's but find their fries to be better than those at many both chain and non-chain places with far better burgers.

FYI, Brian Wansink's work has been found to suffer from numerous, substantial errors.[1] A recent investigation found ~150 errors in four papers on a single set of pizza experiments.[2] I would be skeptical of any result he publishes without first understanding the methodology.

[1] http://andrewgelman.com/2017/04/06/dear-cornell-university-p...

[2] https://peerj.com/preprints/2748/

After tax and tip… I'd be happy to have a beer for $10 to go along with my nonexistent meal.

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