Six ways in which restaurants use menu design to make diners spend, spend, spend

By Matthew Hague | February 3, 2010

By Matthew Hague | 02/03/2010

Menus vary in appeal as much as restaurants themselves, so we were intrigued when we read William Poundstone’s new book, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It), and learned that menus are often designed to sell—wait for it—food. With some of the author’s tactics in mind, we took to the streets to see if Toronto’s restaurants used the same tricks. Turns out most menus have as much design savvy as Lindsay Lohan does fashion sense, ranging between unsophisticated and completely unoriginal. We did manage to find these examples that illustrate Poundstone’s rules.

• Mind games on the menu: The psychological tricks restaurants use to part us from our money [The Independent]

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Menu designers often make the mistake of listing prices in a vertical column, allowing diners to pick items based on price, not preference. More experienced establishments, like **Zee Grill**, shuffle items in different price ranges around the menu, making comparison shopping more difficult and encouraging customers to choose the most appetizing meal, not the cheapest.

Twelve dollars would be a hefty price to pay for a burger at McDonalds, especially when nothing else cracks two figures at the Golden Arches, but when a $12 burger sits on a menu a few items down from a $28 entrecôte grillée frites, the price suddenly seems reasonable. Strategically anchoring expensive items so that others look cheap by comparison seems to be a strategy used on **Tati Bistro**’s menu, where almost every section begins with a top-dollar item.

Not to suggest that **O Noir** is keeping diners in the dark, but by bundling its entire menu into two basic rates (one three-course dinner, one two-course dinner), it’s impossible to tell what any individual component is worth, making the overall value of the meal ambiguous (not to mention the fact that O Noir’s electricity and decor budgets are likely next to nothing).

Placing items in boxes separates menus into little cliques. It’s like high school for dinner plates: items that are in the box seem more popular, while everything out of the box is, well, out. On this menu from **Fred’s Not Here**, the boxes curiously draw attention to the menu’s most expensive appetizers and mains.

Listing two sizes of a dish (as is done at **Churrasco Villa**), without any indication of the difference, is torture for the indecisive customer, who inevitably asks the waiter to mime the approximate size of each dish with his hands. Either way, the restaurant wins: if a customer can recall ordering a small that was too small in the past, they will opt for the expensive upgrade; if a customer goes for the small, they are likely choosing the size—and price—that benefitted the restaurant all along.

The upper right-hand corner of a menu is like the front window of a high-end shop—it is the place to put items that are most desirable, though not necessarily most affordable. **Bier Markt**’s $18 salads, noticeably framed with an array of lines, boxes and a swirl, seem to call out “Order me!”

2 thoughts on “Six ways in which restaurants use menu design to make diners spend, spend, spend”

the situation says:

February 3, 2010 at 12:55 pm

That’s a $13 burger on Tati’s menu, not $12.
baconator says:

February 3, 2010 at 1:42 pm

So? This is a bit of a ‘dog-bites-man’ story. Stop the Presses – restos want you to spend more! unfortunately, the ‘how’ is not well covered.

one minute sorting prices high to low is the sneaky way to encourage spending, the next minute, mixing it up tricks people into spending.

I’ll guess the editor didn’t read the book.

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Six ways in which restaurants use menu design to make diners spend, spend, spend

2 thoughts on “Six ways in which restaurants use menu design to make diners spend, spend, spend”

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