No Rawa Dosa, No Tea!

A quick explanation for non-Indians visiting the site :). Rawa is the South Indian word for samolina (coarsely ground wheat) and dosa is a thin pancake - more like a crepe.

Switch to my favorite city - Bombay or Mumbai to be PC. Mumbai like many megapolises of the world is busy, everyone in a hurry and space is at a premium. Many restaurants in South Bombay are very small with just a few tables sometimes as few as 4 or 6. During the rush lunch hour, most things on the menu are available in a South Indian restaurant but no Rawa Dosa and no tea or coffee. Why do you think that is? Simple - Rawa Dosa takes a relatively long time to cook on the pan (tawa) and people tend to dawdle over their tea and coffee after a meal. What is the restauranteur trying to achieve? Minimize the time spent by each patron at his most constrained resource - a table for his next customer to sit at. So he eliminates those items that either take longer to cook on order or to consume. Another important constraint plays on his mind - there is a short window of time (typically 2 hours, with the middle one hour really busy) for him to maximize his sales. To the student in you, he is managing table yield - revenue per table per hour. In fact to further enhance this, there is an unwritten rule quietly enforced by him and accepted by the busy Bombayites - you share the table with others if you or your party is not occupying all the seats - maximizing utilization at a given point of time.

And that is an astute businessman applying marketing thinking!