Supply and Demand: From Buffets to Digital Services
Meta Title: The Concept of “Unlimited”: From Food & Drinks to Digital Assets
Meta Description: Supply and demand empowers businesses to keep producing goods and services. From Eat All You Can restos to digital assets, what does “unlimited” look like online?
Consumerism pre-supposes that people are going to keep wanting, buying, and consuming goods. This is a cycle that will never cease to exist due to the world that we live in — man and societies have evolved into one giant chain of supply-and-demand, demand-and-supply. For one to not feel exhausted, and eventually fall into endless despair mulling over this dog chasing after its own tail, it is crucial that one realizes that this notion is something in need of acceptance. It may sound like a “harsh reality,” but if we were to look at the cycle as a total negative, there is no coming out of the rabbit hole. On the one hand, as a person of agency, one can choose to utilize this nugget of wisdom.
“How so?” one may wonder. Among others, doing business is a path to take — to be the producer of goods, and be the party at one end. With the knowledge and certainty that there exists some form of demand for a certain good or product, striking while the iron is hot came to be as an idiomatic expression for a reason. For businesses, awareness of a product’s life cycle and knowing when it reaches the peak of its growth is a good time to sustain or maximize profitability.
Feed the Hungry: All-You-Can-Eat
Appealing to the insatiable appetite of man, buffets have grown in popularity in the past decade. Restaurants that offer AYCE buffets are no longer the same places where you can stuff yourself full for a dollar. We have had tables lined up with the fancy Wagyu, truffle, or foie gras for prices reserved for special occasions such as birthdays, graduations, and other parties. The basic mechanism of buffets is simple: a single head is equal to a fixed price for unlimited food. And given this setup, how does a business yield a margin of profit?
One secret for most buffets is effective and efficient waste management. By collecting data on the volume of food produced versus food wasted, and creating projections against the events within a calendar year, a buffet business can make better decisions when allocating supplies for inventory, as well as meal preparation. That being said, the crux of profitability for such a business venture is hinged on setting a price point that consumers deem fair for the AYCE experience. It should be common knowledge that any buffet resto will always have people coming in and looking to overeat; to basically get their money’s worth. But as a business model, this predicament has already been accounted for, and a key metric to success is believing in the law of averages. Take a family of six, for example: they may have one to two members who can and will eat more than they had paid for, but that also leaves the company with at least four family members who can and will only eat as much, or even less, as the average cost to produce.
There are other factors that can come into play, thus affecting the operations of any AYCE establishment. Having a service crew, for instance, won’t apply to other types such as shabu-shabu or Samgyeopsal places. Since the guests cook and prepare their own food as part of the experience, there is less need for more staff than usual. For many people, the appeal of unlimited food is the feeling of celebration that accompanies abundance. To eat many and be merry while doing so — how can anyone beat that experience?
Being In the Digital World & the Demand for Unlimited Resources
Businesses these days have it easier with the development of technology. The concept of limitless resources is an idea that sells, even when the product, good, or service has no physical form. Cloud storage, for example, is a useful service that enables the business with the capacity to grow, simply by providing a fixed volume of available space to the user. To provide this as a service by using a tier-system according to the respective caps of data storage is a manifestation of supply and demand fitting a specific time and age. Some of us are old enough to have witnessed how flash drives replaced CDs and floppy disks. Dropbox, which is quite famous among student- and even professional-circles, is a known platform for data storage, because it is free and accessible.
Unlimited graphic design is another example of a service that provides an invaluable digital asset. Needless to say, graphics are significant to any business. With specific limitations, such as addressing the demand for graphic design given the business’ available manpower or constraints on budget, it is understandable that there are aspects that require prioritization (apart from other operational costs). Dotyeti, a platform that provides unlimited graphic design, helps people meet this demand for a fixed monthly fee. Similar to other online services that can provide the necessary bandwidth so that there is enough of a supply in digital assets, the appeal of unlimited graphic design to the user — vis-a-vis a buffet — is different.
While bottomless drinks and innumerable plates await a customer looking to consume more at an AYCE buffet, wherein the appeal to the client here is to feast, the concept of unlimited graphic design, such as logos, ads, and animation, seems to serve a greater appeal to businesses themselves, and not end-users. The motivation here is to utilize the limitless resources for more gains, such as being the solution to marketing agencies encountering difficulty in supplying the demand. In the end, one can look at this and say that allowing the cycle to continue is not going to help stop the hamster wheel. Owning access to this tech and the availability of these digital services can only reinforce the idea that demand truly is never-ending.