Owners of a Chinese restaurant which offered a generous all-you-can-eat deal have been bankrupt by their customers in less than two weeks.
The restaurant reportedly ran heavy debts and had to close down after some thrifty customers stayed in the store for an entire day to eat ‘several meals’.
Moreover, it’s said promotion-loving pensioners started queuing outside the restaurant as early as 8am in order to take full advantage of the offer.
Owners of Jiamen’er restaurant (pictured) in China have been bankrupt by their customers
The restaurant sells spicy Sichuan-style hot pot (file photo), which is a popular sharing dish
Jiamen’er, selling popular spicy style hot pot, launched the buffet deal on June 1, inviting any customers with a membership card to eat there as much as they wanted for 120 yuan (£14) a month.
The restaurant is situated in Chengdu, a UNESCO City of Gastronomy and the provincial capital of China’s Sichuan Province.
Su Zhe, one of the restaurant’s founders, said the restaurant opened last December and its business was poor. The management decided to offer the deal in hope of attracting more customers, according to a report on People’s Daily Online, citing Chengdu Commercial Newspaper.
Su said the promotion quickly brought more people into the 20-table restaurant, sometimes as many as 500 people a day. Waiters had to work more than 10 hours a day to serve the huge crowds.
However, it quickly appeared that the business was hard to sustain because too many people were heading over.
The restaurant is located in Chengdu (file photo), the provincial capital of Sichuan Province
Chengdu is a UNESCO City of Gastronomy and is famous for its yummy street food (file photo)
Moreover, some customers decided to lend each other the membership card so they could enjoy the deal without paying.
Su said because the membership card didn’t have a photo of the owner, it was impossible for the waiters to stop those with the card from demanding the offer.
One of the restaurant’s shareholders concluded to news site The Paper: ‘The key cause of the failure was that we hadn’t used the facial-recognition system.’
The report said Jiamen’er ran into 500,000 yuan (£58,582) debts in 11 days after selling 1,700 membership cards.
Customers showing up at the restaurant early in the morning on June 13 were surprised to find that the management had decided to shut the restaurant for good.
Co-owner Su, who studied marketing in university, told Chengdu Commercial Newspaper that he and his business partners would draw lessons from this failure.
Su was quoted saying: ‘The main problem was our low management skills. This is a heavy lesson. ‘
The restaurateur said he would not be frustrated by the incident and would carry on opening new restaurants.