Pizza buffet crapflooding

Pizza Buffet Crapflooding is the practice of buffet employees filling the pizza buffet with unpopular pizza, so people will eat less.

I walk into the Pizza Buffet ready for a serious pizza munching fest. I go up to get my first plate. Everything looks good, a nice selection of pizza, not a lot of crappy pizzas.

The place got busy while I was eating my first plate. When I went back to get my second plate the buffet was empty. When the pizza buffet workers see an empty buffet they start crapflooding. A minute later they put out the first crappy pizza (it was jalapeno). None of the ten people standing at the buffet waiting even approached it. Two minutes later they added a mushroom pizza. No one touched that either. A couple minutes later they added both a black olive, and a green pepper pizza. One man took a single slice of this and went and sat down. The next pizza to come out was the ever so popular Green Pepper, Onion, and Black Olive combination. (Which was still untouched an hour later when I left).

Finally they put out a cheese pizza. Half the people in the restaurant tried to get a slice. It was gone in seconds. Only when the place began to empty out did they start making popular pizzas again. The sausage, pepperoni, and ham pizzas finally began to make their way onto the buffet.

Until they got busy again, then it was nothing but peppers and olives.

I too have noticed this phenomenon. The apparent ubiquity of this practice gives me cause to wonder whether it might not be company policy to crapflood.

Crowded buffets cripple the efficiency of employees attempting to serve real customers. Additionally, you pay the same five dollars regardless of how much you eat. It's more economically effective for a restaurant to make 5 pizzas that will act as placeholders for an hour and then be discarded than to make 30 edible pizzas in the same span and in doing so risk pissing off real customers.

Another thing to note is how guilty the employees look when they're bringing out a pineapple anchovy pizza to the buffet. They look disgusted with themselves. They either walk with the solemn face of a remorseful executioner, or try to slither out, sneak the ringer on to the table, and scurry out of there, like a shameful ferret.