Customer food selection prefernce?

[celshark]

Does anyone know if the food customers choose to eat is decided by which food is more expensive, closer to the door or any other factor? Or is it just random? Do they select from the food available on the counters evenly? Meaning each customer takes a different dish in a "cycle" or is that random too?

[kmjnhh123]

I think they just take anything randomly, try watching your restaurant and see if you can notice a pattern or something.

[greygull]

I think there is supposed to be a pattern. If you have ten counters with food, even if they're the same or not, they should be taking one from each counter. It doesn't always look that way when you watch them eat, but if you try keeping track of how many plates you have on each counter, it should drop down close to it. I still have the glitch on Android with blocking the door with the podium means my food still gets consumed with no people. The counters drop down 1 by 1 in plates.

[bawpotter]

I never realized that. I always thought it was competly random!

[dewey1025]

I think there is supposed to be a pattern. If you have ten counters with food, even if they're the same or not, they should be taking one from each counter. It doesn't always look that way when you watch them eat, but if you try keeping track of how many plates you have on each counter, it should drop down close to it. I still have the glitch on Android with blocking the door with the podium means my food still gets consumed with no people. The counters drop down 1 by 1 in plates.

You're mistaken. Just because you sit there and see some foods consumed more often than others doesn't mean there's a pattern. By this logic, you'd conclude that a dice rolls 6's 100% of the time if you roll five 6's in a row and stop.

If food consumption is random, then foods will get consumed in equal proportions as the sample size -- number of plates consumed -- approaches infinity. If you're willing to sit there and watch 100,000 consumed (the more the better) and confirmed that an equal number of plates get consumed, have at it. I've wondered if breakfast items get consumed more during breakfast time, so on and so forth, but it doesn't affect your profit significantly enough for me to want to sit there and find out. Still, I think it's random, since I check my plate count for each food every day.

[greygull]

You're mistaken. Just because you sit there and see some foods consumed more often than others doesn't mean there's a pattern. By this logic, you'd conclude that a dice rolls 6's 100% of the time if you roll five 6's in a row and stop.

I was meaning that if you do sit and watch them, they seem to take only certain things at a time. Like if you have ten dishes, with 24 customers, watching them I've seen 5-6 people at a time take the same thing, 5-6 people take the same of another thing, etc. Just my observation. When not watching, dishes seem to drop evenly. 

[celshark]

I did an experiment, I took 3 different foods and placed them on 3 different counters each with 550 plates. I watched closely and observed that after 3 attempts each time resulted that foods were consumed differently. I concluded (after only 3 tries) that customers select RANDOM foods to eat.

A few interesting observations:

It takes customers approximately 37 minutes to eat 1650 plates of food if you keep your happiness at 100, don't get interrupted by notifications and make seats and podium as close to entrance as possible while providing enough seats for continuous customer flow.

Even tho they start off pretty evenly the range in the difference between the slowest consumed food and the fastest consumed food can reach up to +20 plates.

Each of the 3 times I did this, there was a different recipe left on the counter to be consumed last. (Maybe if I would have kept repeating this process, I would have found a larger sized pattern.)

[paliden99]

If you have 10 counters, all counters will be used evenly from # 1 to 10 before it repeats. All I cook is roast chickens, if you have 18 counters for each of your stoves and leave it overnight (8 hours of sleep), you'll notice you make ~100,000K. Of course you can't cook roast chicken continuously, so during the nights that I don't have any I only make about 60K.

[Mogwai4111]

If you're willing to sit there and watch 100,000 consumed (the more the better) and confirmed that an equal number of plates get consumed, have at it.

Somebody did this a few months ago in bakery story (and I assume RS works the same way). They cooked up roughly 30,000 of each food and then tracked sales and found that everything was sold at the same rate.

I'm not sure if having different amounts of food on different counters would affect this though.. possibly? The tester before did not specify how much was on each counter, just how much he had of each different product. Really wish I could find that old thread.. lots of good info in it, selling rates and what not, even quantified the daily rollback the servers do (or did at the time) in bakery story.