Ramit Sethi explains how restaurants engineer menus to make you spend more, with descriptions alone boosting revenue by over 25%. He shares concrete moves: ask staff to box half your meal before serving, skip alcohol, hit early-evening specials, and lunch instead of dinner.
I Will Teach You to Be Rich.
Rosa Mexicano.
More than 25%.
Overweight and in debt. The recession doesn't mean you have to rule out restaurants. You just have to learn how to literally make sense out of a menu.
It's actually a highly engineered document designed to get you to spend more money.
Ramit Sethi is the author of the book I will teach you to be Rich. During our lunch at Rosa Mexicano, he talked about how menu descriptions can increase revenue more than 25%.
Roasted pulled duck layered between soft corn tortillas. They could have just said what it was in three words, but they added these beautiful descriptions which makes me want to say, wow, this sounds really good. Oh, it's a few dollars more than.
I want to spend.
It's worth it.
The mouth watering descriptions tend to come before the price.
You'll notice. Look at the descriptions and the titles. They're in big, bold letters. Price not so big.
One thing that's often big is the portion we eat.
Can I have the chicken enchiladas? And. Yeah, and can I have, can you actually box up half the meal before you bring it out?
Okay. Now why did you decide to ask him to box up half of it?
One of the big, big principles of saving money here and anywhere is if you don't see it, you're not going to want it. So the portions that we have these days are huge, but if you put it in front of us, we're going to eat it.
Turns out his half order of chicken enchiladas was more than enough.
This thing looks like a full meal.
Plus, he still has another meal for lunch tomorrow. Some other ways to cut your share Food. Drink water instead of alcohol. Look out for early evening specials. Avoid buying items a la carte. Go out for lunch instead of dinner. You'll likely see a difference in your wallet and waistline. Lindsay Davis, ABC News.
