Yahoo Finance 5 Menu Manipulations That Trick You Into Spending More
Consumer psychology has become the basis for marketing tools at many businesses, and restaurants are no exception. Psychological manipulations through colors or music can influence a person making a decision -- and even increase the likelihood of splurging.
At restaurants, the menu is no longer simply a detailed list of dishes offered, but rather, a strategic map that works to manipulate what people order and eat. In fact, future chefs and restaurateurs are taught menu engineering as part of their curriculum at culinary institutions, so they can design the perfect menu -- one that steers customers to high-margin items that increase the restaurant's profit. Here are some of the traps hidden on your menu:
Tactic No. 1: Love at first sight
Where diners' eyes are first drawn to when they open the menu is prime real estate. Profitable dishes that restaurants want to promote will be placed either on the top portion of the first page or displayed with underlines or boxes around them. Note that these items tend to be overpriced.
Similarly, the order matters, which is why the items on the menu are not listed indiscriminately but with extra care as to which is placed first. Customers are more likely to choose the dish at the top of the list.
Tactic No. 2: Staggering prices lead to staggering bills
You might have noticed that menu items are often listed in an illogical order -- and never in the order of prices. By shuffling the order of dishes by the prices on the menu, it becomes more difficult for customers to compare the cost of dishes. Restaurants do this so you can fall in love with an expensive dish before you get a chance to register its relative price.
Tactic No. 3: Implicit placement for explicit decision-making
Studies have shown that most diners do not make a meal decision based on a dish being the most expensive or least expensive item on the menu. To compensate for this phenomenon, restaurants will sometimes stick an overpriced decoy located near the top next to a less expensive high-margin item. Note that the most profitable item is not necessarily the most expensive item on the menu.
Tactic No. 4: Making money appear abstract
Prices on a menu are often listed without the dollar sign in front of them. One study by Cornell University's Center for Hospitality Research found that diners spend more this way. Restaurants do this to make the cost become less threatening and appear more abstract. Without the dollar sign and decimals, it helps blur judgment about monetary value. The dollar sign is often avoided, as many people associate it with the concept of cost rather than gain. In other words, the sign reminds consumers how much dishes will cost them.
Another trick is using a smaller font size than the rest of the menu to display the price. Humans have a size bias which causes us to relate physical size with numerical size. Therefore, a number written in a smaller font will be perceived to be smaller in its numerical value as well.
Tactic No. 5: Getting full off the description
Diners are used to reading elaborate descriptions about a dish -- like Prosciutto di Parma made from hogs fed corn, chestnuts and filtered water at sustainable Vermont farms. This isn't necessarily because your restaurateur is a lover of words, but rather because studies have shown that overly descriptive menu items just sell better than ones that are not. For this reason, restaurants try to add value to items by attaching flowery adjectives, descriptions and special names to make them more attractive to customers.
Many of these traps seem obvious -- so what makes us so susceptible? The reason lies in human physiology, as our brains are just wired to perceive things in a certain way. As long as you're mentally prepared to take those biases and manipulations into consideration when ordering, it may prevent you from succumbing to schemes and choosing what you actually want to eat at restaurants, rather than what they want you to order.
Theresa Kim is a research analyst and writer for MyBankTracker.com, where she covers banking and personal finance.
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