On the Strange Economics of the Hotel Breakfast Buffet

There is a particular kind of person who would never eat four sausages at home but will eat them in a hotel because breakfast is included. At home, four sausages would require an explanation. In a hotel, leaving them behind would require one. Somewhere between reception and the scrambled eggs, appetite has been replaced by a procurement strategy.

The hotel breakfast buffet is a small theatre of economic confusion. People who spent the previous evening discussing where to eat will spend the morning consuming whatever happens to be available beneath a hinged metal lid. They are on holiday. They have choices. But they have also paid, and the mushrooms must answer for it.

The pleasure of not paying again

Imagine two otherwise identical hotel offers. One charges £150 for a room and £20 for breakfast. The other charges £170 with breakfast included. The arithmetic has not changed. The experience may have.

In the first arrangement, breakfast must justify itself. You consider your appetite, the café across the road and whether twenty pounds is a reasonable price for toast that has passed twice through a machine without visibly changing. In the second, the decision has already been made. You give your room number and proceed as though the establishment has generously adopted you.

Economists Drazen Prelec and George Loewenstein explored the relationship between payment and enjoyment in their 1998 paper on mental accounting. Their model describes how consumption can call the cost back to mind, and why a flat fee can feel preferable to repeated charges, even when it costs more overall.

That is not a hotel experiment, and it does not establish that everyone prefers the second offer. It provides a useful explanation for its appeal: paying once can remove a succession of small financial negotiations. The extra coffee arrives without reopening the case.

This can be perfectly sensible. A holiday partly consists of paying to stop administering your own existence. Knowing where breakfast is, what it will cost and whether somebody else will wash the plate has value. We should not mistake every preference for convenience for an inability to add.

An investment in eggs

The trouble begins when freedom from calculation becomes an obligation to extract value. You are no longer deciding what you would enjoy. You are trying to make the earlier decision look financially competent.

The distinction is familiar from research on sunk costs. In a 1985 study by Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer, theatre subscribers who paid more attended more performances during the following six months than those given discounts. The money already spent appeared to influence subsequent behaviour.

Theatre attendance is not overeating, and the study does not tell us what is happening beside every hotel toaster. But it identifies the relevant temptation: allowing an irrecoverable payment to instruct the present.

Once breakfast is paid for, another sausage does not make the bill smaller. Its value depends on whether you want another sausage. This is an uncomplicated proposition until you encounter a man explaining that he intends to skip lunch. Breakfast has become a consolidation exercise. He is bringing two meals under a single management structure.

There is nothing wrong with a large breakfast or a small lunch. The peculiar case is the person eating beyond enjoyment to avoid feeling cheated. They have decided the hotel must lose, even if the contest has to take place inside their abdomen.

The seduction of the word “included”

An included breakfast is not free. It is bundled into a purchase whose individual components may be difficult to price. Nevertheless, “included” can perform some of the emotional work of “free”, particularly when no money changes hands in the dining room.

Research gives us a reason to take that distinction seriously. In experiments published in 2007, Kristina Shampanier, Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely found that reducing a product’s price to zero shifted choices more strongly than a straightforward cost-benefit account would predict. Free appeared to add attraction as well as remove cost.

Those experiments concerned genuinely zero-priced options, not breakfast concealed inside a room rate. Applying them here is an interpretation. Still, it is worth noticing how easily a purchase can disappear from consciousness once it stops presenting a separate bill.

The same hotel guest who would question the price of a pastry may take two without much thought when they are available on a tray. The pastry has changed departments. It has moved from expenditure to opportunity.

The plate has opinions

Fortunately, researchers have studied actual hotel buffets, so the argument need not depend entirely on imaginary sausage enthusiasts. A 2013 field experiment by Steffen Kallbekken and Håkon Sælen found that reducing plate size cut food waste by 19.5%. A separate intervention, using a sign encouraging guests to help themselves more than once, reduced waste by 20.5%.

These are results from a particular setting, not universal percentages to attach to every smaller plate. Nor do they prove that guests were attempting to recover their room charges through bacon. They show something more practical: how a buffet is arranged can affect what ends up being thrown away.

The sign is especially interesting. It reassures people that taking less now does not mean losing access later. The food will remain available. Breakfast need not be approached like the evacuation of a small island.

A buffet can therefore create excess without anyone having consciously decided to be wasteful. A large plate supplies space. An abundant display supplies possibilities. The guest supplies an optimistic assessment of how much melon they will enjoy.

Getting your money’s worth

The wider problem is our tendency to treat consumption as evidence that a purchase was worthwhile. Finishing the box set, using every feature and taking the extra helping are visible achievements. Enjoyment is harder to audit.

This is where an apparently thrifty instinct can become expensive. The payment is fixed, but attention, time and comfort remain available to lose. Staying with something merely because you paid for it can turn one disappointing decision into an ongoing commitment.

Sometimes the best use of an unlimited breakfast is a coffee and a piece of toast. Sometimes it is a leisurely second plate. The point is that access permits either. It does not impose a minimum level of participation.

The buffet’s real luxury may be the freedom to stop thinking about prices for half an hour. That is a reasonable thing to buy. It becomes less luxurious when we immediately appoint ourselves to conduct an internal value-for-money review.

Somewhere, a guest who was comfortably full ten minutes ago is returning with a waffle. They do not particularly like waffles, but these are included. Outside, a city they have paid considerable money to visit is getting on with its morning. First, however, there is the matter of recovering the room rate in batter.