OddThinking

Mandating that pizza sizes be expressed in terms of non-crust area rather than mere diameter is a platform I could get behind.

But your last suggestion fails for the same reason that the current situation is untenable. The incentive for a pizza place is to sell more expensive pizza with toppings that have a higher marginal profit. Current labeling practices, designed to obscure the true size of a pizza, have been created because of this incentive.

If the actual pizza selection is left up to the pizza place, they will err on the side of bringing out too much pizza with ‘gourmet’ toppings.

In addition, you have not taken into account the garlic bread/breadsticks factor which skews the pizza/person ratio for any large group.

If you want to state the requirements in the public domain, I give you this:

http://dinnerwire.softwire.com/

We use it every time we order pizza for groups in the office. A colleague wrote it during Employee Innovation Day; the idea was that it would support places other than pizza hut at some point, but we never got around to it.

It’s built for UK Pizza Hut, is optimized for their large pizza deal (2 large pizzas + 2 sides), and really likes the “Softwire standard pizza” which is an abomination of pepperoni, ham, pineapple and jalapeno, but if you click “something slightly different” you get a nice selection. I don’t know if the pizza names translate well (have you got Meat Feast, Super Supreme, etc. over there?), but if it does you might find it useful.

Configurator,

Alas that site requires a password to see.

Jonathon,

Re: Crust sizes

Yes, good point. A maximum crust width should be defined. Crusts larger than that width are only permitted if the non-crust area meets the size minimum.

Re: Varying Topping values

I don’t understand how the differing topping prices would incent obscuring the true size of the pizza, and would appreciate further explanation.

Re: Biases Gourmet Selection

I believe that is a price well worth paying. If you want to add “2 of the adults are skint” to the spec, that seems reasonable. Any pizza parlour that pushes their luck by only supplying gourmet will eventually lose business, especially when they state the price. (By the way, the price should also be provided on a per-head basis (i.e. the total price is $61, which comes down to $7 per adult, $4 per child)

Re: Garlic Bread factor

You know, I almost mentioned this, but decided to keep it simple. The selection of garlic bread, herb bread and pizza sticks is an excellent example of where such a decision-deferring scheme would shine.

Have you ever been in a restaurant with a large party (i.e. 10 or more) and had the wait-staff ask “Shall I bring out some garlic bread?” I dread that question. How can I possibly assess the (generally indifferent) bread desires of a large group of people in a few seconds. Far better for the wait-staff to understand that a group of 12 people typically needs two serves of garlic bread and one of herb bread, and that no individual member of the party has the experience to know that.

Don’t get me started on Yum Cha, where I believe canny staff can take advantage of that quandary to oversell. I want to interview a Chinese family to better understand how their social structure traditionally handles such situations to avoid being ripped off.

The size and toppings are independent results of the same incentives.

The pizza parlor is a profit-maximizing venture. At the margin, they will take actions that increase their revenues. So how does this play out in toppings?

Usually toppings are either ‘standard’ or ‘gourmet’ and there is a fixed per-topping cost in each of these categories. So perhaps ‘roasted garlic’ and ‘bacon’ are both gourmet toppings. The roasted garlic probably costs less than the bacon. Therefore they will be more likely to add roasted garlic onto your pizza and bill than bacon. Similarly, pepperoni and bacon are probably equally costly but because of consumer demand pepperoni is a standard ingredient while bacon is not. Therefore they are more likely to want to but bacon on than pepperoni.

In addition, they’d much prefer a customer who ordered a large and ended up with a couple extra pieces (or an uncomfortably full feeling) than one that ordered a medium.

So if you mandate that the pizza-selection service is done by the parlor rather than the customer, the parlor will be more likely to pick certain toppings over others and more food. This will make pizza-eating more expensive on average for no net consumer advantage.

What you really want is a neutral third party. Just expand configurator’s idea and you’ll have a Pizza Party App to sell on iPhones. 🙂

Ack. Clarification. Each of the ‘gourmet’ and ‘standard’ categories has a fixed per-topping *price* but in reality the cost to the pizza parlor varies. This leads to the potential market distortion. 🙂

Interesting. I will think about that dilemma.

I came back to this page to tell you I have changed my position on crust to be inline with your original suggestion. Defining a maximum crust width will promote non-circular pizzas to increase the crust:surface area ratio. I neither wish the law to encourage nor discourage non-traditional shapes, except to suggest that tessellating shapes are more efficient where oven size is at a premium.

That’s weird. I don’t think it’s supposed to do that – “it’s a publicly available service”, or so I’m told.

I’ll check it out.

Jonathon,

I pondered your dilemma.

It reminds me that sometimes, when a server asks what my choice is between a number of options, and I don’t have a preference, and I say “Surprise me.” That should be welcomed by the staff. If there are different prices or different costs for the different choices, they can supply the one with the greatest mark-up. Alternatively, if it is something like the type of bread on the sandwich, they can choose the one that they have in greatest supply or the one that is about to go stale. Or – all else being equal – perhaps they can supply me with the one of which they are most proud to try to bring me back for more.

Yet, some staff get a little flustered by this; as though I am making their job harder rather than easier, and that surprises me (so I suppose I got what I asked for!)

Then I realised the solution to your problem. Let the pizza parlour provide you with pizzas created with their cheapest materials, and let them share the savings with you. If you let the staff select the pizza, you pay slightly less than if you happened to select the same grade of pizzas from the menu. The staff may also ask “You’ve ordered our “6 hungry adult meal deal”. Do you want to pay $5 more for the premium selection, which includes more bacon and less onion?” We just need to be careful that it doesn’t degenerate into the same “How can I know?” quandary for the customer.

Note: The staff-selection system also opens up the door for offering franken-pizzas. Even if you only order one pizza, you might get 4 different topping selections, each on quarter of a pizza. This isn’t feasible where every person explicitly chooses their toppings, but if there are four orders for staff-selected pizza being prepared at the same time, all four customers can enjoy a greater selection.

I’ve already submitted a comment which was flagged as spam. If it was flagged because it was too long, and it will eventually show up through moderator intervention, then no worries. In the meantime, I have another, shorter comment:

Don’t get me started on Yum Cha, where I believe canny staff can take advantage of that quandary to oversell. I want to interview a Chinese family to better understand how their social structure traditionally handles such situations to avoid being ripped off.

As I noted in my other comment, Wikipedia goes into surprisingly little detail on the yum cha ordering process, which I consider the second most salient feature of yum cha (the first being the dim sum dishes). If the quandary you are referring to is simply that of family-style ordering (which is customary in all Chinese group meals, not just yum cha), the overselling problem is “handled” simply by having a knowledgeable and skilled party foreman who orders for the group. (This can lead to an alternate but altogether different problem, which is how to decide who is foreman.)

For dishes other than dim sum (and a lunch-time meal that doesn’t involve dim sum is usually not referred to as yum cha), an authentic Chinese restaurant will serve portions that are larger than a sane amount for one person. So if people insist on going around the table, ordering one dish each, they will of course buy too much (unless they are footballers or other abnormally hungry bunch). Just understanding this one aspect of Chinese food culture should be enough to prevent overselling. (Shouldn’t it?)

John, I am horrified to report I can’t find your comment. I thought I had found it – it appeared as a chimera way down in the spam logs, but when I tried to manually approve it, it disappeared!? Now, I have been searching the underlying database, and the record is gone!

I am so sorry!

Thank you for the explanation about the “foreman”. I did once ask a couple of young Australian-born but Chinese-descent friends at a yum cha outing (yes, with the dim sum dishes) whether it was traditional for the patriarch or the matriarch of the family to handling all ordering for the table, but they were unsure.

With a group of non-Chinese friends eating yum cha in Australia, the decision process seems to be rather ad hoc and arbitrary.

For full-size meals, yes, I think it is commonly understood that about three dishes will serve four people. It only takes one person in the group to know this and to volunteer not to select a dish.

Although, I clearly remember as a teenager, we had a family gathering of a dozen adults and children. It was organised at the last minute, and the adults decided to order in Chinese food. A late uncle of mine was left in charge of the ordering. He was a big man with a large appetite and apparently no understanding of these guidelines or how much others ate. We were amused to find he had ordered a dozen soups, a dozen entrees (a.k.a. appetizers in the USA), a dozen mains, a dozen serves of rice and a dozen desserts. There was a ridiculous amount of left-overs after that meal.

Not to fear (or perhaps all the more so to fear!) for I was able to use the back button just after I got the failure message and retrieve the text, which I then saved to a file Just In Case:

Don’t get me started on Yum Cha, where I believe canny staff can take advantage of that quandary to oversell. I want to interview a Chinese family to better understand how their social structure traditionally handles such situations to avoid being ripped off.

Hmm… the Wikipedia yum cha article only mentions “family-style ordering”, which I suppose is what you are (a) trying not to get started on, yet (b) wanting to find out more about from a Chinese “family”.

In my yum cha experience (spanning New York, Toronto, Hong Kong, and various suburban Chinese restaurants mostly in New Jersey), there are two predominant process flows, neither of which even involves staff in the selling process.

The more fun of the two processes, not offered at all restaurants, involves staffers pushing around carts of dim sum dishes. These staffers follow a mostly preset route that spans the restaurant floor. The patrons can see (and hear, if they understand Cantonese) what kind and how much food is being offered per dish. If any of the patrons at the table wishes to order something from a passing cart, he or she quickly polls the table to get an estimate of the demand at the table for that item, then orders appropriately from the cart pusher. (The poll basically amounts to “anyone else interested in this?” and the levels of demand usually break down to just “low” (order one dish of the item under consideration) and “high” (order two dishes). In extreme cases, and only in quite large groups (roughly 8 or more), there could be very high demand (order three dishes). I have never seen any order bigger than three dishes for a single item from a single cart, except for not-easily-shareable items such as single-serving bowls of congee. If the item happens to be consumed very quickly and there is still demand, the party waits until another cart with that item comes around again before ordering more. If, while waiting, they order other stuff from other carts and eat until they are full, they may never get around to ordering the beloved item again; but presumably they have enjoyed the intervening items in the meantime, so it really doesn’t matter. This process simply continues until the party is satisfied that they have eaten enough.

The restaurants that don’t offer the above process, yet still serve dim sum, generally provide an ordering sheet that lists all their offerings. The party fills out the desired quantities on the sheet, which is then taken by the server. From the restaurant’s point of view, this is the same as a traditional Western-style order, except that the patrons (usually through a single customer at the table who acts as foreman for the party) write down their own order instead of dictating it to the waitstaff. From the patrons’ point of view, it is somewhat more onerous than the wandering-carts model, because they have to decide approximately how much the whole party needs up front instead of having a steady stream of food flowing to them until they are full. But this is no worse than a standard (not yum cha) meal, and it is still acceptable to submit a second order sheet later if it turns out the party is still hungry. (The only disadvantage to deliberately erring on the low side for the first order sheet is that you have to wait for the subsequent round(s) to be processed; but again, this is no worse than dictated orders to waitstaff.)

So I don’t understand where the overselling problem comes in; or at least, how the overselling problem for yum cha is any worse than for any other type of sit-down ordering process. Is yum cha somehow radically different in Australia?

Side note: John emailed me to rescue his latest comment which was also marked as spam. I found this one in the spam bin, and worked out why it had been banned.

It seems John partook in the notoriously dodgy activity of… gulp… linking to Wikipedia! TWICE!

Yes, somehow in the past few days, Wikipedia made it into the globally shared blacklist of sites considered spammish to link to! I have manually removed it, and hopefully it won’t come back.

Sorry for the inconvenience, John!

John,

Yum cha isn’t radically different in Australia, but I have seen in yum cha restaurants that the waitresses pushing carts (and I think it has almost exclusively been women, with men taking care of the drinks) stopping to ask a member of the party if they want any of her wares – that is, they actively spruik their food, and don’t just passively wait to be called upon.

There follows a discussion about what foods she has on her cart (often made more difficult by conflicting accents and with the food hidden in bamboo steamer baskets). The person then looks helplessly around the table at everyone chatting away nineteen-to-the-dozen obliviously. The hapless victim is then forced to make a rapid decision on behalf of the table while the waitresses makes even more suggestions. Sometimes, two people at the table are being approached by different cart-pushers at the same time, introducing race conditions to the situation.

Now, I am not suggesting that these need for rapid decisions are so stressful as to ruin the entire experience, and I am not suggesting that the waitresses deliberately choose the most hapless looking member of the party, who they figure is most likely to succumb to sales pressure. But, I do see an opportunity for such behaviour. Where such pressures exists, societal norms and personal practices will usually evolve to protect against it – such as nominating a spokesperson for the group. Testing that hypothesis is why I’ve been meaning to ask a traditional Chinese family about it.

Ah. I see now. I think it mainly comes down to experience and adventurousness. If your party consists largely of people who will try anything, then it is usually OK to adopt a strategy of “get one dish of one item from any one cart at a time” or similar. And maybe add in something like “no more than three dishes every five minutes” (adjust depending on the voraciousness and talkativeness of the group).

And then, of course, note whether each item was a success or not, so you can hopefully recognize them later and remember whether to order them again. Until you have sufficient experience, and especially if your party consists mostly of “picky eaters”, nothing beats having an already experienced spokesperson/translator in the party.

While I understand the situation you find yourself in with yum cha, and I sympathize, I do think it’s just like anything else that a person has insufficient knowledge about. When I worked in Taipei for a summer, a bunch of us went to a newly opened TGI Friday’s for lunch. I was familiar with the chain back home in the U.S., but it was my colleagues’ first time, and they were utterly unprepared for the American-sized portions (we each ordered individually). On average, I think we ate less than half of what was served to us.

Then there is the case of a deli near a hotel where I attended a convention here in the States. I was in a small party and we were kind of surprised by the high prices on the menu, but we were short on time, energy, and patience, and there were few other eating establishments around, so we each got an expensive sandwich. Little did we know that each platter was meant for FOUR OR MORE people! (In other words, a good bargain for people who know how this place works, and a regrettable waste of both money and food for those who don’t. The next time we went, we brought an army of our friends.)

I still feel that dim sum dishes, while foreign to many, are not more prone to overselling than most other types of food, mainly because each dish is so small and (in the case of the roving carts) you can at least see them in person before you order them.

Julian,

Let me juxtapose two pieces of your comments:
“Have you ever been in a restaurant with a large party (i.e. 10 or more) and had the wait-staff ask “Shall I bring out some garlic bread?” I dread that question. How can I possibly assess the (generally indifferent) bread desires of a large group of people in a few seconds.”

“It reminds me that sometimes, when a server asks what my choice is between a number of options, and I don’t have a preference, and I say “Surprise me.” That should be welcomed by the staff…. Yet, some staff get a little flustered by this; as though I am making their job harder rather than easier…”

I suspect you are also seeing a difference in perspective. You know you are a rational customer who will genuinely accept whatever surprise is dished up. But they can’t tell the difference at first glance between you, and some psycho who will complain that the order included food their guests were allergic to, or hated, or that it didn’t magically have food not on the menu, or whatever. Not all customers are rational; there should be a standards body for that, too.

I have seen a photo out on the interwebs of a menu option called “Shut up and eat it (whatever the sandwich maker feels like fixing for you).” This provides some sort of two-way contract on what the surprise is, and probably makes the staff a lot more comfortable putting it together.