A-ha! Even the venerable Blueberry Hill (from last week’s post) is susceptible to flaws.

1) You’ll have to look closely, here. The All-American Platter reads: “choice of three bacon strips, three sausage links, or three sausage patties.” Same price.

Just below, the first Side Order option reads “Four pieces of bacon, three sausage links, or two sausage patties.” Same price.

Which means, given the uneven valuations of bacon and sausage patties, we’ve got an economics problem! Your optimal strategy, when ordering your sides, is to get four strips of bacon—a bonus slice of bacon, according to the All-American Platter equation. When ordering the All-American platter, you do the reverse: order three sausage patties. In a full-on supply & demand economy (including the option to participate as a seller as well as a buyer), you’d have an arbitrage opportunity: buying bacon in the side-order market and selling bacon in the All-American platter market.

This, in the scheme of things, is not that big a deal.

2) More important: For all the work they do to make Blueberry Hill a comfortable place…what the heck is up with the policy of no separate checks?

I mean, places can do separate checks. It’s fairly commonplace. Why wouldn’t you offer it? Why would you automatically build in an inconvenience for any party greater than one or two? Is it worth the extra, say, $0.20 to give your customers a hard time? Or is Blueberry Hill busy enough, and confident enough in its business, that the $0.20 transaction differences add up?