A couple of days back, I had some Bhelpuri from a roadside vendor. He served his stuff in a smallish plate, but filled it with heaps of Bhel. The customers who were around were quite a delighted lot that the plate is filled with heaps of Bhel, failing to notice the fact that the plate was a smallish plate. The optical illusion of a filled plate (even if its small) creates an amazing effect of plenty.
Likewise, check out the accompanying visual of coffee tumblers, a species uniquely South Indian with the twirled edge. Tumblers are available in many sizes as you can see. The average south Indian home has coffee tumblers available in a few sizes (these are from my home), but go to a hotel or a cycle coffee wallah and the tumbler size mysteriously reduces to the size of a thimble (almost). But, and here is the trick, the vendor serves an overflowing cup of coffee.
Like the previous example the effect of a heaped plate or an overflowing cup can have great visual effect and leaves the buyer thinking, thats a good bargain! So, when you are serving customers, is your plate heaped?
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Is your plate heaped?
Posted by ecophilo at 8:27 PM
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4 comments:
Hi Neelakantan
In the U.S., the smallest size of coffee you can get at Starbucks or most other coffee houses is 12 oz. I think they figure that the real cost is the overhead of hiring a guy take your order and serve you your coffee so they might as well serve a ton of it.
Yes, thats true. The US is all about large portions while India is more about economy. The way the dynamics of a market changes because one resource is in surplus (labour, for instance)is fantastic to observe.
Have you come across the tumblers with the false bottoms ? Looks huge, and overflows at the top, but is only half-full. Quite a few businessmen in Ahmedabad have tea served in such tumblers.
What about the good old "one by two" in bangalore roadside shops, they only work with the bigger size tumblers :)
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