Why do people keep stealing the small sauce bottle?
Restaurants in San Francisco sure love exclusivity. I got a random email from OpenTable from TBD, a new restaurant taking over the old Akkikos space on Bush - still run by the Akkiko’s team, but now focusing on izakaya style food instead of sushi
One of the dishes I tried was their karrage hot chicken. It came with a sauce bottle with their secret spicy sauce. Sour and sweet, it’s a great edition to this bird.
As the staff came around to pick up my plates, I was a little sad as they took away the bottle. I asked them if I could keep it, but the waiter told me that people have taken them too often and they’re low on bottles.
I was a bit astounded, this is an exclusive restaurant, was this sauce that good that people were down to steal it from a place where you couldn't even walk in, you had to get a reservation through OpenTable, thus knowing exactly who was sitting where and when?
No; it wasn’t that amazing, it was good, but I think the bottle’s design could give us some insight on how product design can effect behavior of users.
Sorry for the image, it’s just on the right, but if you notice, it’s quite small, unmarked and made of just plastic.
When deciding how to even package a product, one should consider how people’s existing biases affect the utility of a product itself. If you design something to look like a squeeze bottle, even if you make it out of glass; people will attempt to squeeze.
The most famous example, if you pull from books like “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman is the Norman Door itself: doors that look like they can be pushed or pulled, but only actually work a single way, leading most of these doors to have to be labeled.
Now back to this sauce bottle; I think there’s an intersection of a few biases at play. The first is the bottle is diminutive yet reasonably sized: it doesn’t hold a lot of sauce, but it holds enough for maybe two or three chickens, giving incentive to use it again, maybe at home. It's sealable, you can just lock it up and pack it up. The bottle is very basic, it looks like a bottle that someone could easily pay in bulk a dollar or less for, plastic, they won't mind that it's gone. Finally it’s also unmarked, which could give a negative bias to as well, usually restaurants that want you take things home, would give a label or mark to it, but it could also bring people to think it’s not meaningful if the bottle was gone either.
Now for the restauranteur, what is the solution I propose? I think you should just not let the bottle be sealed. When there’s no seal, it becomes infinitely harder for someone to sneak it out, and even those with good intentions, when you see a open container or a container with an unclosable opening it signals that this product, like a plate or a cup is part of the restaurant’s ecosystem, where it will be used for every other guest; clean, reused, refilled and again and again.
Will this prevent all theft? Probably not, some people have no decorum, but it would definitely drift from a common occurrence to anomaly in the restaurant’s lifespan.
