GUO: I've never even heard of a Cortez clam. It is, like, piles and piles.īERAS: And it's also different types of crab and different types of clams. You have crab legs, shrimp cocktail, Dungeness crab. The first thing we come across? An entire island of seafood.

When we get inside the Bacchanal, we see that this is not cheap food. It was cheap and easy food.īERAS: But not anymore.

GUO: Brian tells us buffets used to be this amenity that casinos offered to keep gamblers gambling. He ran things at the Bacchanal for years. MURZYN: We have a reservation at 7 o'clock.īERAS: Brian Murzyn knows the ins and outs and finances of one of the biggest buffets on the Strip. It feels like an exclusive nightclub, but luckily, we are here with a buffet insider. There's this huge line of people waiting to get in. GUO: There is, like, this shiny metal-plated rope. The name for it is called the Bacchanal.īERAS: Yes, that is its real name. GUO: So we're here at the Caesars Palace buffet. This might be the longest line I've seen since we've been here. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: No, it's way over there somewhere.īERAS: Oh, it's over there. GUO: But the real reason we went to Vegas was because Vegas is home to some of the biggest, most extravagant, all-you-can-eat buffets in the world.īERAS: Oh, this is it here? Oh, this is. We rode a roller coaster that went through a hotel.

SYLVIE DOUGLIS, BYLINE: This is PLANET MONEY from NPR. Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at /planetmoney. It was edited by Jess Jiang, engineered by James Willetts, and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Today's show was produced by James Sneed and Nick Fountain with help from Emma Peaslee. And along the way, an economist and fellow buffet-lover will teach us his hyper-rational strategy for optimizing his buffet experience. Our mission? To feast ourselves on all the economics we can handle at the all-you-can-eat buffet. Today on the show, we're headed to the place where the modern buffet may have been born: Las Vegas. From classic concepts like adverse selection, sunk costs, diminishing marginal returns, to more exotic economic mysteries, like the flat rate pricing bias.

Here at Planet Money we believe there's a lot of economics going on at the all-you-eat buffet, tucked in between the mountains of brisket and troughs of mashed potatoes. But you know where you can really see a lot of economic concepts in action? Buffets. An economic scavenger hunt at a Las Vegas all-you-can-eat buffet : Planet Money You might expect to find economic concepts in the pages of an economics textbook.

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