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-Short Attention Span Theater-
Guiyang restaurant tries out 'pay what you want' policy, loses 100,000 RMB ($15k) in a week
2016-10-18
In order to attract customers to her new restaurant, a restaurant owner in Guiyang came up with a noble if naive promotional policy, allowing diners to order how ever many dishes that they desired and then simply pay whatever they wanted when the bill came.

Turns out, this is a really, really bad idea.

While the tactic did manage to attract many diners to the new karst-themed restaurant on its opening day, on October 2nd, it didn't manage to manage to attract much moolah. Some customers paid only 10% of the cost of their meal, while others dared to leave just 1 RMB on the table. After seven days, the restaurant had lost 100,000 RMB, The Paper reports.

"If our food or service was the problem, then that would be one thing," owner Liu Xiaojun sighed. "But according to customer feedback, our dishes are both filling and tasty. It's just that the payments don't match up with the evaluations."

After just a week, the promotion fell apart. Liu and her two partners got into an argument and one of the partners fled back to his hometown, vowing not to return.
Posted by:Blossom Unains5562

#5  Ah, so they organized a public charity entity Panera Cares - 2 locations nationwide.

Can't pay for your food, earn a voucher after an hour of volunteer time at the location. Also, can't pay then you have to stay in the restaurant to eat your meal.

Pictures crack me up - certainly not in a food desert, as polite elites would say.
Posted by: swksvolFF   2016-10-18 16:19  

#4  Panera Bread chain tried this a few years ago. My search found two articles related to that program - pay what you want. First was the pee your pants excited about the program. The other was a preliminary report on the St. Louis area results - averaged 75% of listed price, and that there was initially great support, and that fancy restaurants in rich neighborhoods do not have many disadvantaged customers, and that many customers were not aware of the program.

So I would guess that there was an initial support of people paying for a bowl of chili with a $20 and telling the restaurant to keep the change (instead of tipping, heh) and a number of customers just paid the total without knowing the program, and enough people took advantage of the program to counter-act the supporters and drop the average sale to 75%.

No mention of the program on their web site.

I'm guessing other than 15 minutes of glowing publicity: failure.
Posted by: swksvolFF   2016-10-18 16:09  

#3  I think there was a restaurant in Portland this year that did the same thing, with the same results. Most lefties are unusually naïve...
Posted by: Raj   2016-10-18 15:47  

#2  Different cultures, different results. Had they tried it in Iceland, the results would probably have been different.
Posted by: trailing wife   2016-10-18 07:44  

#1  Arithmetic wins again!
Posted by: SteveS   2016-10-18 00:59  

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