Category: General Interest

Items of general interest – for mass consumption

The secret science of restaurant menus

This is how restaurants get you to spend more:

Smart chefs (or their menu consultants) know that when most of you open a menu, your eyes go right to the top of the page on the right side. And, armed with that knowledge, chefs place the menu item that will give them the most profit at the top of the page. Hence, it soon becomes their biggest seller. Then, your eyes normally drift to the center of the page. That’s where many chefs place their absolutely most expensive item. They do that not because they expect you to buy that item, but because the psychology of menus indicates you’ll probably then look at the items immediately above and below the high ticket item and order one of those. Again, those two items rank second and third for generating profits.

I’ve tested this in a dozen different restaurants – and then asked the chefs about their menus. Sure enough, they’ve admitted the practice. “Millions of dollars have been spent to understand what makes a profitable menu,” one chef told me. “By rearranging the order and relaying it out, it can mean tens of thousands of dollars of additional revenue. It has to do with everything from wording or naming, length of description, the number of columns, visuals of icons and pictures, price points, and not using dollar signs.”

See full article. (Found on Shantanu’s blog.)

Choose: Riches 100 years ago or middle-class today?

This post compares the life of a regular guy today with one of the richest people about a 100 years ago. :

If Mark Hopkins or any of his family contracted cancer, TB, polio, heart disease, or even appendicitis, they would probably die. All the rage today is to moan about people’s access to health care, but Hopkins had less access to health care than the poorest resident of East St. Louis. Hopkins died at 64, an old man in an era where the average life span was in the early forties. He saw at least one of his children die young, as most others of his age did. In fact, Stanford University owes its founding to the early death (at 15) of the son of Leland Stanford, Hopkin’s business partner and neighbor. The richest men of his age had more than a ten times greater chance of seeing at least one of their kids die young than the poorest person in the US does today.

And also:

Here is a man, Mark Hopkins, who was one of the richest and most envied men of his day. He owned a mansion that would dwarf many hotels I have stayed in. He had servants at his beck and call. And I would not even consider trading lives or houses with him. What we sometimes forget is that we are all infinitely more wealthy than even the richest of the “robber barons” of the 19th century. We have longer lives, more leisure time, and more stuff to do in that time. Not only is the sum of wealth not static, but it is expanding so fast that we can’t even measure it. Charts like those here measure the explosion of income, but still fall short in measuring things like leisure, life expectancy, and the explosion of possibilities we are all able to comprehend and grasp.

See full article. If you are one of the people who keeps complaining about “progress” as a bad thing, you should read it carefully.

Facebook/Orkut are Tribal Societies

This NYT article argues that the use of social networks like facebook or orkut is similar to social customs that existed among humans during tribal times. Excerpt:

Michael Wesch, who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, spent two years living with a tribe in Papua New Guinea, studying how people forge social relationships in a purely oral culture. Now he applies the same ethnographic research methods to the rites and rituals of Facebook users.

“In tribal cultures, your identity is completely wrapped up in the question of how people know you,” he says. “When you look at Facebook, you can see the same pattern at work: people projecting their identities by demonstrating their relationships to each other. You define yourself in terms of who your friends are.”

Read full article. Quite interesting.