Intro
An all-you-can-eat restaurant assumes every customer is a normal human being.
Some people eat very little. Some eat an average amount. Some eat a lot. And once in a while, a sumo wrestler walks in.
The restaurant has already priced all of that in.
But what happens if Kirby shows up?
The answer is simple.
The restaurant is done.
All-you-can-eat is a business that only works because Kirby and Luffy don't come.
It sounds like a joke, but as a matter of business it's pretty much the whole point.
All-you-can-eat is built on how much humans can actually eat
An all-you-can-eat place looks at how much customers eat on average.
Light eaters, average eaters and big eaters all get mixed together. As long as the average stays inside what the price was designed for, the restaurant is fine.
This works because the human stomach has limits.
No matter how hard a person tries, there's a ceiling.
- The stomach fills up
- You feel full
- It starts to hurt
- You feel nauseous
- You slow down
- The time limit runs out
So the restaurant sets its price on one assumption: humans can't eat forever.
Sumo wrestlers are outliers, but they're still human
Sumo wrestlers and competitive eaters eat far more than the average customer.
For the restaurant, a single one of them might mean a loss.
But a sumo wrestler is still a human being.
There's a limit. There's a cap on how fast he can eat. There's a cap on how long he can stay. There's a cap on his stomach.
So if there are only a few of them, the restaurant can absorb the cost.
A sumo wrestler is an outlier, but he's still inside the distribution. He's just way out on the right-hand tail.
Luffy is dangerous
Luffy is seriously dangerous.
He eats an absurd amount. And he seems to turn whatever he eats into fighting energy almost instantly.
A real person needs time to digest. A real person gets full. A real person has to go to the bathroom.
But Luffy eats a mountain of food at a feast and then goes right back to fighting. He eats meat and recovers. He uses his Gear techniques. His metabolism is straight out of a manga.
So from the restaurant's point of view, Luffy is
a high-metabolism problem customer who turns food into fuel in an instant.
Still, Luffy does have some limits within the story's meal scenes. He isn't on Kirby's level of otherworldly.
Luffy is dangerous, but he still falls into the "manga-style big eater" category.
Kirby is outside the distribution
Kirby is different.
Kirby doesn't have a stomach.
He inhales. He copies. He turns it into an ability. He sucks up enemies and objects alike.
That's less "eating" and more extradimensional storage plus ability conversion.
You can't really treat Kirby as an all-you-can-eat customer.
The restaurant's model assumes the usual variation in human stomachs. Kirby isn't anywhere in that distribution.
Light eater
Average eater
Big eater
Sumo level
Luffy
------ Beings who still eat, just barely ------
Kirby
------ Another dimension ------
Kirby isn't an outlier. He's from another dimension.
On a Pareto chart, Kirby takes everything
Say you draw a Pareto chart of the food cost at an all-you-can-eat restaurant.
Normally it looks like this.
- Average customers are the biggest group by headcount
- Big eaters push the food cost up
- Sumo-level customers are few but stand out
- Light eaters cost very little
But add just 1 Kirby and the chart breaks.
One customer takes most of the food cost. Every other customer's bar looks tiny. It's not a Pareto chart anymore. It's a Kirby chart.
That's not just an outlier. It's a threat to the business staying alive.
What the all-you-can-eat terms of use would need to say
If Kirby existed in the real world, all-you-can-eat restaurants would have to rewrite their terms of use.
We ask that the following customers please refrain from using our service.
- Those with extradimensional storage abilities
- Those with inhaling abilities
- Those with copy abilities
- Those who inhale restaurant fixtures other than food
- Those who instantly convert what they eat into fighting energy
- Those whose stomach capacity far exceeds the normal range, for example through the Gum-Gum Fruit
It's sad, but it can't be helped.
Kirby is adorable. But to an all-you-can-eat restaurant, he's a cute-faced weapon of cost-ratio destruction.
Poyo...
It's a joke, but it's also the real point
This Kirby story is a joke.
But it connects to something real about business.
Not just all-you-can-eat: a lot of businesses assume a "normal distribution of users."
- Subscriptions assume nobody uses the service to the max every single day
- Insurance assumes nobody has an accident at the same moment
- All-you-can-drink assumes not everyone is a heavy drinker
- All-you-can-eat assumes not everyone is Kirby
That's why the model collapses when a flood of extreme outliers shows up.
A business runs on averages and distributions.
Summary
All-you-can-eat works because Kirby and Luffy don't come.
A sumo wrestler or a big eater might cost the restaurant money one at a time. But if there are only a few, it can absorb them.
Luffy is dangerous, but he can still be seen as a manga-style big-eating human. Kirby, though, is from another dimension.
All-you-can-eat is an expected-value business built on the normal spread of human stomachs.
In other words,
Humans aren't Kirby. That's why all-you-can-eat works.
It's a joke, but it's also pretty much the whole point.
