How Much Would You Have to Eat at a Buffet For the Restaurant to Lose Money?

There’s a Chinese buffet on Airline Drive that my family really loves.  We eat there a couple times each month and the last time we were there I just couldn’t eat enough of their boiled shrimp.  I must have made 7 trips back to the buffet for refills.  I remarked to my wife Julie,  “These guys are losing on me today.  Bet they won’t let us come back.”  After a little research, I find that I couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Some buffet employees and owners have revealed just how much a customer would have to put away before they actually became a liability and the amount is staggering.

At your standard buffet, "Crab legs are the most expensive item, at about $3 to $4 a pound.  Everything else is less.  So if the buffet is $20, you'd have to eat five to seven pounds of just crab legs alone.  "Roast beef costs about $2.50 a pound so you’d have to wolf down close to an entire 10 pound roast.

At the average Chinese buffet “you'd have to eat at least eight to 10 plates stacked up with just meat and no rice or other cheap stuff."

Think you’ve put some damage on those pizza buffet guys before?  That’s highly doubtful.   "A whole pizza costs the restaurant about $1.25.  So even if the buffet's only $5, you'd have to eat four entire pizzas for them to break even."

And at your traditional old country buffet, "The average customer eats about $2.50 worth of food and the average price was $13.  So you'd have to eat about six times the average amount to cost them money.”

So, belly up as often as you’d like, that restaurant isn’t scared!