Ryu's Blog

I went to a Japanese restaurant in China town with two American friends and had a free lunch. The restaurant is known for serving foods with reasonable quality in large portions and at low prices, so there’s usually a long line waiting in front of restaurant at any given time. The services and attitudes of the waiters are generally bad but given the price/quality/quantity combination, it’s a place I revisit.

So how did I end up with a free lunch? My friends and I each ordered a main dish. On top of that, one friend also ordered a sushi dish that he believed was not fresh based on the appearance (he didn’t try it) and his past experience (we both lived in Japan and tried lots of sushi). So he told a waiter he wanted to cancel the dish. The waiter believed the sushi’s fine (it looked fine to me as well, but I couldn’t tell without trying it) and said the dish will be charged even if not consumed.

Given the US’s customers-centric belief, my friend found that unacceptable and said he’d walk out at that moment if he were to charge for it. So after some heated exchanges and the waiters’ consultation with managers, they decided to get us out. All this happened while I was enjoying my bento set. I told them I’m satisfied with my food and am going to pay for it (given they let me finish the food of course), but they didn’t want that and wanted us out. So I had a free lunch, and I should be grateful the quarrel started late enough that I could at least finished half of my food (I should have eaten that last piece of salmon).

Now a bit of economics, the economists are still right that there’s no free lunch (it’s only free on our part, not for them). After walking out of the shop, I initially thought their decision was irrational. They could have just lost the income from one small side dish and get money from our main dishes and drinks (and they’d probably resell the sushi dish later given my friend didn’t touch it), instead they decided to forego all the income, not to mention the potential revisit of the consumers and negative evaluations. But given more thoughts, I think it could be a rational behaviour after all. As I mentioned, the shop is never lack of customers, so there’re little incentives for them to encourage revisit through good services (they’re confident in their price/quantity/quality combo and the long lines prove they’re right). So it’s reasonable to assume that the psychological benefits they obtained were greater than the cost of losing sales and the potential sales.

There’re probably cultural factors involved as well. From my perspective as an Asian, I would find my friend’s behaviour unacceptable as well if I were the waiter unless someone has actually tasted the food and found it bad. I think the frame of reference is different for the two cultures. For the US, the customers seem to have the right to decide whether foods are in an acceptable quality and could decide not to pay for it if that’s the belief. But for us (at least for me and the shop), we tend to think that once something’s ordered, we’ve the obligation to pay for it, unless we could prove that the quality’s bad (even in that case, it’d still depend on which aspects of the quality, if it’s not health-related concern, most Asians would probably still put up with it and pay for it, but never order it again). Given my friend didn’t try the food and the cheap price of the shop; it’s really subjective to judge whether a sushi dish is of acceptable quality. So I wouldn’t side with my friend this time and that difference arises from our different beliefs of consumer rights. But thanks to him I had a free lunch.

So if you want to have a free lunch in China town, go to Misato (the Japanese shop) with a US friend, order your meal plus a side dish, and then say the side dish is of unacceptable quality (or not what you expected), but remember to do this after you finish or almost finish your meal. There you go, a free lunch.