Psychological Implications of Dining at the Golden Corral

Typically, a corral is a place to pen or enclose livestock.  Gold is associated with wealth, grandeur, prosperity.  Thus, a Golden Corral is a restaurant where the shareholders are betting on the typical customer consuming less than $7.99 of product, factoring in overhead, real estate, the wholesale cost of food and advertising, while penned up grandly in a corral.

$7.99 reflects the rate paid by a senior(over 55) customer designated as an "Early Bird," coming through the entrance doors between 11:00 AM and 4:00 PM weekdays.  While 4:00 PM is not really that "early" for lunch, Golden Corral Franchising Systems, Inc., headquartered in Raleigh, NC, hopes the customer will eat like a bird.

As a middle-aged lady was pacing herself to beat me to the door yesterday, at Brownsville's Golden Corral, I faced the moral dilemma of admitting defeat or leaving Nena to fend for herself over the curb and beating the bitch to the door. Chivalrously, I stayed with Nena, letting the lady get firsts.  Hopefully, there would still be food left on the buffet line.

Buffets used to be called all-you-can-eat places.  I laughed as a kid, when my maternal grandpa, an immigrant from East Flander, Belgium, Adolph Joseph DeMan, filled up at the salad bar in our first experience at an all-you-can-eat place in Portland, Oregon.  But, then, the cost was only $1.00 in those days.

Lance Trenary, CEO of Golden Corral

Nena and I picked a colored plate and dinnerware. I know these plates, blue, green, orange and red. They feel like "Melmac," the plates our parents bought when we were kids.  They were made of hard plastic and wouldn't break for anything. Someone made a fortune on Melmac, hula hoops, frisbees, Davy Crocket coonskin caps and styrofoam.

Once inside the restaurant, I surveyed the competition.  An 80 year old man in a black guayabera shirt walked by with TWO plates of baked chicken.  I don't care if one plate is for his 300 lb wife.  That type of chicken is 30 cents a pound wholesale.

Next!  

A lady has a full plate of watermelon and papaya squares.  Amateur!

While Nena fools around with her salad bar pickings I'm nervous like a cat.  The fried catfish bin has been empty and I've walked by it twice.  I get another Melmac plate, reaching for the lowest stack, blue, my lucky plate.

Four guys are waiting in front of me for catfish, one with two plates.  A cook with a white chef hat comes out raising two fingers.  Yes, 2 minutes!

The line gets longer behind me, but I'm not worried about them.  Will the four guys ahead of me, one with two gawdamn Melmac plates, leave anything for me?

OMG!  These are gentlemen!  No one takes all the fish, even the one with two plates only has four pieces on each plate.  I put five pieces of fried catfish on my small Melmac plate, thinking mostly of my stroke-victim wife.  I stop at the salad bar and throw on a few lime slices.  Heaven!