24 Methods Eating places Upsell Their Visitors

Restaurants are in a world of pain when it comes to making money. Competition is fierce in the hospitality world, and failure is always around the corner. To become successful, restaurants need the elusive combination of great quality, affordable prices, the right location, and a dedicated guest base.

People often joke that to make money as a restaurateur, you need to start with a large fortune. It’s unfortunately true because the industry is unforgiving of even the smallest mistake, and making money is a struggle.

With razor-thin margins, it’s no wonder restaurants look for ways to make customers spend more money.

Lead With One High-Priced Item

The primacy effect is the natural human tendency to remember the first item on a list better than the ones following. For example, you’ll remember this entry better than the following ones because your brain has already fixated on it.

Restaurants take advantage of this phenomenon and put the expensive item at the top. Many customers scan menus rather than reading them, so catching their eye with an expensive item at the top ensures they pick it. It’s a good tactic to pump up numbers.

Leave the Dollar Sign off the Menu

Any restaurant’s goal is to put food on your mind and take the price away from your mind. Many menus list the food first and the price second. More impactfully, many remove dollar signs entirely to make the price look less intimidating. Likewise, many avoid using prices that end in “9.”

These prices signal that an item is valuable, but its quality is average or poor. People are used to seeing prices like “$27.99” at the grocery store. Restaurants, especially high-end ones, don’t want to have the same association in people’s minds as lowly grocery stores. They want to be better.

Use Nostalgia To Sell High-Priced Items

If you frequent restaurants, you’ll have noticed all the menu entries that start with “uncle” and “grandma” and reference classics or comfort food. You may look for these dishes and often order them yourself because they make you feel nostalgic about your own family’s dishes. Who doesn’t have a good memory of their mom’s cooking?

Restaurants often use this tactic to attract people to certain dishes because they like the suggestion that a real relative came up with the recipe. Research shows they’re more likely to buy “Grandma’s Cream of Mushroom Soup” than the “Wild Mushroom Soup.”

Appeal to the Senses

Food is an experience for our taste buds and all our senses. A well-written menu will appeal to your senses and add words like “aromatic,” “crunchy,” or “sizzling hot.”

These high-impact words make customers imagine the food already in front of them and more likely to order more expensive items. Without descriptive words, the menu is just a list of dishes; it has little to no impact on the senses. However, these words bring it to life and strongly appeal to customers — especially hungry ones!

Give a Backstory

Another way to entice customers is to create a backstory. Restaurants may put down “ethically raised chicken” or “pork loin from our farm-pastured pigs that live happy lives.” While this doesn’t immediately make customers more willing to pay more for the item, it does improve their perception of the restaurant.

This improved perception may cause them to order more food or return for another meal. Backstories also help restaurants create a mystique and improve their reputation. For example, they can position themselves as the “place to be” for various groups.

Blast Music To Fill and Empty Seats Quickly

If you frequent pubs or other quick-service establishments, you’ve probably had to raise your voice to speak with your fellow diners more than once. These restaurants blast music to ensure a steady flow of customers.

Because they sell average-priced items, they don’t profit when customers linger. Instead, the longer you spend on your burger and fries, the less profit the restaurant makes unless you order quite a few drinks during that time. That’s why these places play loud music to get you to order quickly, eat, and get on your way.

Play Classical Music To Make the Food Taste Better

On the other hand, if you visit an upscale restaurant, you’ll notice the music is subdued and is often not the latest hits. Instead, these establishments play classical music. Classical music makes them seem classy and, more importantly, slows you down.

Slowing down and relaxing makes you more likely to order a dessert or have another drink. Since drinks can make restaurants a lot more money than any other item on the menu, this upselling tactic is one they are more than happy to use repeatedly.

Sell Merchandise

Food and drink margins are quite low, so selling merchandise is a great way for restaurants to make customers open their purse strings for more items. For example, Hard Rock Cafe makes 40% of its sales from selling merchandise.

Selling branded products may also increase the profits of other restaurants by gaining a more loyal and larger following. When restaurants do well, patrons wear or display their merchandise, increasing profits by improving the establishment’s “word-of-mouth” reputation.

Offer Drinks To Get You Started

Offering drinks to get you started is the norm at busy, high-flying restaurants where you have to sit at the bar to wait for a table. However, in many other establishments, the waiting staff often offers you a drink before bringing you the food menu or telling you the specials.

It is already an upsell because drinks are some of the higher-margin items on the menu. Drinks also make you hungry, making you likely to order more food and spend more money.

The Bracketing Trick

Bracketing is a neat trick restaurants use to make you buy the option that’s the sweet spot between the most profitable and most expensive. Think about ordering coffee. One option is so big you’ll never finish it before work starts. Another one is tiny for the price. Then, there’s the one in between, which seems just right.

You may not know it, but the coffee shop has just made up your mind and got the best deal to boot. You are now sipping the drink it wanted you to buy, and you’re none the wiser.

Bundle Meals With High-Margin Extras

Bundling refers to increasing the value of a meal for the customer by adding high-margin extras that don’t cost the restaurant a lot. For example, restaurants may offer customized wine pairings with tasting menus because selling wine by the glass has a huge margin.

Likewise, it could offer you extras at an added cost, which you may refer to as “nickeling and diming.” Although these extras cost peanuts, when you add them up for dozens of customers daily, you get a nice upsell.

The practice is similar to the grocery store tactic of selling buy-one-get-one-free offers to entice you to buy. However, it makes the restaurant much more money than the grocery store could dream of.

Pre-Set Tipping on the POS

Restaurants are not the only ones looking to upsell. Waiting staff also does, often with the restaurant’s blessing. Since fewer people use cash when they go out for dinner, they must use a POS with pre-set tipping percentages. When they tip, they often pick the middle tier, even if it’s more than they were going to tip, because they don’t want to be “cheap.”

Pre-set tipping is a good way for waiters to exploit people’s desire to be socially acceptable and friendly.

Use Small Plates

Restaurants can upsell you by using small plates, offering tapas, and charging a small fee for extra dips, toppings, and dressings. Unlike an entree, they can also take advantage of the fact that we don’t perceive small plates as a full meal.

Our brains immediately identify a large plate of food as enough to quench our hunger. However, many small plates just leave us hungry for more. Because of that, we keep ordering them, contributing to the restaurant’s bottom line.

Engineer the Menu

Once restaurateurs figure out their most profitable dishes, they often engineer the menu to place them where your attention will naturally fall first strategically. Beyond putting them at the top, they often use more subtle touches, like fonts, colors, white space, and layout, to get you to notice these money-makers.

After all, it is fair to make a healthy profit. Customers often compliment the menu layout, unaware that its design is not entirely focused on looking modern or stylish but aims to get more of their hard-earned cash.

“Do You Want Fries With That?”

When you hear this question at your local junk food joint, it’s a prime example of classic upselling. The server won’t just ask you if you want an addition in more high-end restaurants. They’ll often steer you toward more expensive or higher-margin items with the good old bait-and-switch tactic.

This tactic draws you in for a bargain and makes you order a higher-priced item instead through persuasion. For example, you’re dying for the steak and frites. How about adding a prawn skewer? Yes, please! Well, that prawn skewer comes at an added cost, and you just got upsold.

Communicate Directly With You in the App

Many restaurants encourage customers to use their app. It’s convenient for you and a great way for them to get your money. Within the app, your favorite eatery can use menu engineering, bundle items, bracket them, and upsell to its heart’s content.

Moreover, the restaurant can offer you individual perks you can’t resist once you become a loyal customer. The catch? You keep grabbing your phone and going back into the app, which plays right into their hands.

Offer Desserts To Go

Many customers refuse the waiting staff’s dessert offer because they’re too stuffed from their meal. Offering desserts to go is a way to make them pay for items that they may otherwise leave the establishment without ordering.

Desserts to go also signal to patrons that the restaurant cares about their overall experience and wants to improve beyond its walls and into the customers’ dining room. You’d probably return to a place that’s thoughtful enough to pack you a dessert you enjoy.

Increase Value With Discounts and Happy Hour Deals

Many customers take advantage of happy hour because they can enjoy discounted drinks and appetizers. Restaurants often instruct their servers to encourage these bargain hunters to buy add-ons like additional drinks or a full-price entree.

The one time restaurants don’t want you out of your seat as soon as you finish your appetizer or drink when you just took advantage of a happy hour item. They know they can get you to order more at regular prices. To be fair, why would they?

Play the Right Music To Make Your Food Taste Better

Research finds that music can make food taste better. For example, an upscale bakery specializing in chocolate and coffee desserts is likelier to have customers returning if it plays low-pitched music like Pavarotti’s “Nessun Dorma” because bitter tastes translate better when someone listens to those low sounds.

Playing high-pitched music would have the opposite effect so that customers wouldn’t enjoy their tasty morsel as much. On the other hand, if you’re selling ice cream, you’ll want to play high-pitched music. It makes your patron’s taste buds appreciate the sweet treat more.

Personalized Table Service

Personalized table service is an effective way to upsell clients if the waiting staff is trained well. They can often read our mood and tailor how they approach us in a way that looks like incredible customer service yet upsells us.

Even grumpy patrons may relent and order more food or drinks when coaxed by a well-trained server. Think of the last time your server joked with you, and you left the restaurant in a great mood, although you weren’t too happy to be there in the first place. Chances are you ordered a drink you may have forgone had the server been impersonal or distant.

Use Dynamic Pricing

Restaurants use dynamic pricing to increase demand for certain products. For example, they can lower the price of a basic burger during the high season to increase profits by increasing their sales of a popular item.

Even though it may not seem like a smart tactic, it brings in a lot of foot traffic, which makes up for the lower price point. At the end of the day, restaurants look at everything that contributes to their bottom lines, not just the high-price sellers.

Create Loyalty Programs

Two out of five restaurants use loyalty programs to upsell. Starbucks, for example, uses its loyalty program to upsell its customers by offering exclusive perks and experiences.

Besides creating customer loyalty, these programs tell them they’re valuable to the restaurant. People love to be valued and treated like they’re special. Few things make them more interested in spending money than feeling important enough to get a special perk or VIP treatment.

Don’t Overwhelm With Choice

The paradox of choice refers to how too many choices can paralyze someone. The opposite should be true, but think about how overwhelmed you feel when you look at a huge menu. You probably spend much more time deciding what to order when there are five pages to peruse than when there’s only one.

Restaurants design their menus to avoid customers falling prey to this paradox. They have separate sections and put the expensive items at the top. It’s easy to sell more expensive items when they are right in front of our noses.

Don’t Show Pictures

Strangely enough, pictures of food not only stoke hunger but can also create feelings of disgust if they’re poor or hurt consumer trust if they portray menu items that look vastly different from what customers receive. While they’re common in certain countries, like Japan, they are not an upsell tactic that works well, generally speaking.

Restaurants use illustrations instead to make hunger their friend. Illustrations don’t have a visceral effect on people, so customers don’t feel negative emotions when they look at them because they don’t claim to be “real.”