Idea for Restaurant

9/11/16

I was thinking today about supply and demand and restaurants today. Specifically, just how do restaurants come up with their food genre, their menu items, and how do they market their restaurant to attract customers. I know there are many methods to do these things, but I wanted to look at it from the ground up.

An idea struck me - just let the customers decide. Here is my proposal on how to do this.

First, start out with a restaurant, say it is named "DemocracEat", for democracy and, of course, eating.

The owner will start things off by creating the menu with just a few menu items to get customers in. Once the customers are in, then things get interesting.

At the end of every meal the customers will be presented with a survey (perhaps it is attached to the receipt). The customers can choose to fill it out, and it will ask a few short questions like:

• From what you ordered tonight, which items should the restaurant keep on the menu?
• What items should the restaurant add to the menu?

Once the owner of DemocracEat gets a large enough percentage of votes to remove an item from the menu, they will do so. Also, once the owner gets enough write-ins for items, they will add those items to the menu.

Over time, theoretically, this procedure will allow the restaurant to have exactly what the majority of the people want to eat.

There are some logistical issues to be sure, but I believe the slow-ish nature of democracy could allow a restaurant to carry this out with relative ease.