All-you-can-eat restaurant goes bust after people ate all they could

Here’s a sage reminder that the all-you-can-eat business model can go very, very wrong.

A hotpot restaurant in China went bust after two weeks because of a deal where customers could eat as much hot pot as they could for a month for only 120 yuan ($19), as reported by Chengdu Economic Daily.

Jianmaner in Chengdu had to close last Tuesday after a spike in bargain hunters who bought the membership left the business 500,000 yuan ($78,000) in debt. 

“We knew we would be losing money [by launching the discount promotion],” said one of the owners, as translated by South China Morning Post. “We wanted to accumulate more loyal clients through this strategy.” Read more…

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