A short piece in Time pro­fil­ing Gregg Rapp: a “menu engi­neer” who opti­mises restau­rant menus to max­imise prof­its.

The first step is the design. Rapp rec­om­mends that menus be laid out in neat columns with unfussy fonts. The way prices are listed is very impor­tant. “This is the No. 1 thing that most restau­rants get wrong,” he explains. “If all the prices are aligned on the right, then I can look down the list and order the cheap­est thing.” It’s bet­ter to have the dig­its and dol­lar signs dis­creetly tagged on at the end of each food descrip­tion. That way, the customer’s appetite for honey-glazed pork will be whet­ted before he sees its cost.

On a sim­i­lar theme, another arti­cle looks at how using obscure ter­mi­nol­ogy and unusual or hard-to-read type­faces can influ­ence din­ers.

All this talk of influ­ence, food and psy­chol­ogy reminds me of the little-known second-cheapest wine syn­drome. The fol­low­ing from a Har­vard Law Record arti­cle:

Restau­rant own­ers will often price the wine they buy cheap­est at whole­sale as the second-cheapest wine on the menu. Why? Because peo­ple gen­er­ally don’t order the cheap­est wine and thus often turn to the sec­ond cheap­est. Price that one higher, and you get a big­ger mar­ginal profit. Presto—restauranteur as microeconomist!