Thanks to Jamie for pointing me to this article, from the Daily Mail
online:
How to BEAT the all-you-can-eat buffet: The expensive foods you should fill up on (and the cheap ones to avoid to get your money’s worth)
The hacks were revealed on Channel 4's new documentary The 2,000,000 Calorie Buffet.The show, which airs on Monday, reveals that Brits spend around £4,000 on dining out a year.One of the most popular options for eating out is the all-you-can-eat buffet as you pay one low price - usually between £12 and £15 - and can eat as much as you like.But there's money to be made in this business - on a typical night, one of these restaurants can make £12,000. The show looks at the best ways to beat the buffet, as well as the tactics the restaurants employ to earn as much profit as they can.
Questions:
1) Is it reasonable
that “Brits spend around £4,000 on dining out a year”?
2) How much do we
spend on food in a year?
3) Where does “2,000,000
Calories” come from?
Answers:
1) This seems massively high. It is about £10 per day (exactly £10 per day
would be £3650 per year, which could sensibly have been rounded. Taking the £12 cost of a buffet meal, that
makes £4380, which also rounds to £4000, so you could have a buffet meal every
day of the year. Alternatively it is
about £80 per week, which seems like an expensive meal to me.
2) This is a nice opportunity to think about
supermarket shopping (take the family bill for the week, subtract non-food
items and then divide by the number of members of the family, add on other
purchases (coffee, soft drinks, snacks, etc).
3) If a restaurant makes £12,000 per night and it
costs about £12 then that requires 1000 customers. If the average calorie intake per day is 2000
then multiplying the two gives 2 million calories. (I have no idea whether that is where this
comes from, but it seems plausible!)
