Do you give your customers what they really want?

Twice recently I’ve been out for meals to pubs that I’ve not visited before. In both cases, the pubs were in lovely surroundings with nice décor inside and the food was good. However, there was the same problem with both of them. The portion size of the food in these pubs was far too large!

I do like my food and I can easily eat too much sometimes (ok, too often!) but in both visits there was no way I could finish my meal. In the first pub, I was out with family having a meal as a treat and so we decided to order starters because some of the starters sounded lovely.

The starters that arrived were easily big enough to be main course in their own right! Then the main course arrived and that was also enormous. In the second pub the main meal was so large it had to come on multiple plates with the main meal and salad filling one large dinner plate and another sizeable plate for chips.

This got me thinking about several things. Firstly, I think that World War II had a big effect on British eating habits. That seems to be a strange thing to say in 2012 but let me explain. In 1939 rationing was introduced and meant that food was very scarce. This carried on until 1954 and I think the British culture of having to clear your plate of food was either created or reinforced during that time.

This meant that at least several generations have been taught that “you can’t have any pudding unless you eat all of your dinner”. Basically this means we are teaching our children to carry on eating after they’re full in order to get the treat of a desert!

So, in Britain (and probably many other cultures) we feel bad for leaving food. People routinely feel the need to apologise for not eating everything on their plate. In some other cultures, eating everything on the plate is a sign to your host that there wasn’t enough and the host feels obliged to give you more to eat.

It would be much better if we could get our heads around the fact that we should let kids eat what they want and still have a treat. If they leave half of their dinner then that’s actually good. It means they know when they’ve had enough. Should they be denied the treat of a desert because they stopped eating when they’d had enough? Probably not but I would guess that feels completely alien to most parents in Britain even though it might help the kids stay thinner in later life.

So, all of that means that a pub serving larger meals is likely to leave their customers feeling less happy when they leave. They’ve had a good meal but they wasted half of it which means they may subconsciously feel less happy because they didn’t clear their plate. They also paid for ½ a meal that was wasted.

If the two pubs I’ve encountered that prompted this story scaled down their portion size then they would probably be able to reduce the cost of the meals (neither of them were particularly cheap) and have happier customers.

I personally believe that families eating out in the evening are probably mainly after a nice meal that is sensibly priced. It’s expensive going out to eat with two adults and a couple of kids and if the meals feel like value for money then the customers would probably come back more often.

In one of the two pubs, it was expensive and the food wasn’t good enough to justify the cost. We won’t be going back there. In the other pub, it wasn’t actually too bad on price but I don’t like meals that are too large and even if I do go back, I’ll certainly only order a main meal which means the pub loses out on the revenue of a starter and the chance of more drinks that we would have during the extra time a starter takes.

The point is that if these establishments stopped to actually notice things then they could improve their business. Plates consistently coming back with a lot of food remaining on them or even asking their customers what they think might help develop an understanding that there’s something wrong. If they listened and adjusted their behaviour they could actually make their businesses much more profitable and successful.