How customers choose a venue and what they order

Before tuning prices or hiring staff, it helps to know exactly how a customer decides where to eat and what to order. The rules are short, and they explain most of what you see on your menu: why some items sell constantly and others never move at all.

Three steps, every visit

Every customer belongs to one of a district's customer groups. Each group has its own budget and its own taste, and each district mixes the groups in different proportions. When a customer goes out to eat, the game runs three steps:

1. Pick a venue. The customer looks at the open venues within reach and picks one at random. The odds are weighted by how popular each venue is with that customer's group, plus a small distance adjustment (about ±0.1). When it rains, most customers only consider venues with a free covered seat.
2. Pick one item. Only items that are in stock count, and dishes and drinks are compared together. The customer finds the in-stock item with the highest satisfaction for their group, then picks uniformly at random among all in-stock items less than 30 satisfaction points behind it.
3. Maybe add a drink. If the pick was a dish, there's an 80% chance the customer also takes one drink from the same shortlist. If the pick was a drink, that drink is the whole order.

We checked this against a real save: across about 12,000 reviews, customers ordered a drink only 4,282 times, a dish only 6,170 times and a dish with a drink 2,099 times. A rule where everyone orders a dish first can't produce the drink-only orders.

The 30-point window

This is the rule that matters most for menu design:

orderable = in-stock dishes and drinks where (best in-stock item) − satisfaction < 30

Say one group scores your four menu items like this:

The noodle dish, the soda and the soup each get about a third of this group's picks. Two thirds of the picks are dishes, and 80% of those customers also add the soda, so the soda ends up in most orders. The salad gets nothing from this group, though it may still sell to another group that scores it differently.

What follows from this

• An item far below a group's best is dead weight for that group. The site greys these scores out so you can spot them.
• A great drink can crowd out your dishes. If a drink scores 30 points above every dish for a group, that group orders only the drink. Cheap drinks with a high score do this to low-budget groups.
• Inside the window, every item is equally likely. A mediocre dish in the window sells as often as your star dish. That spreads stock usage, but it also lowers the average taste satisfaction in reviews and can drag down profit if that dish has a thin margin.
• Selling out moves the window. When your best item runs out, the next best in-stock item sets the window, and items that were dead may suddenly start selling, at lower satisfaction.

Drinks

A drink sells in two ways: as a customer's main pick, or as the 80% add-on after a dish. Both need the drink inside the 30-point window. A drink that scores well for a group therefore adds revenue on top of most dish orders, while a weak one is never added at all.

Having both food and a drink on the menu also raises your popularity. See Popularity.

Practical tips

• Give every group you care about one standout item, usually a dish. It brings them in through popularity and sets the window.
• Keep the other items you want to sell within 30 points of that group's best. Reprice or replace the rest.
• Price your drinks so they land inside the window but not far above your dishes, or that group will skip food.
• Remember that price changes satisfaction. Raising a price can push an item out of the window, and lowering it can bring it back. See Dish satisfaction explained.
• Keep everything in stock. Out-of-stock items are skipped, and a customer who doesn't get their whole order loses 0.5 to 1 star on the review (see Review stars).
• Don't run a menu that's too small. With one or two items, one of them takes nearly every order and runs out quickly.

Try it

• Load your save under My Save and open the menu page. It shows each group's satisfaction for every item and greys out the ones a group won't order.
• Try menus and prices in the Planner.
• Browse dishes and their tags in the recipe wiki.