It's marketing, a loss leader, etc. The waitlist makes people curious, and gives them the feeling of scarcity and a fear of missing out. No need to scale so they don't.
Perhaps they could use a cryptocurrency for customers to be able to demonstrate that they were entitled to a beef croquette. Proof of Steak I think it's called.
Funnily enough I was planning my stay in Amsterdam today and thinking “damn I need to find where the good croquettes are”… What is your recommendation? Where should I go?
Van Dobben near Rembrandtplein. "Kaascroquetten broodje met mayo" (Cheese croquette on bread with mayonnaise) was my goto when I lived there some years back. Good enough to order two. Very filling and tasty.
Don’t look for “good croquettes.” Low expectations are key.
Once you are reasonably drunk, they will find you. Get ‘em on a soft white roll with mustard. Then, you smash em in the sammich. Irritatingly delicious, if you ask me.
To state the maybe-not-obvious here: beef croquettes are frying up a thing and fundamentally are totally fine and delicious with any meat. They of course taste _better_ with better meat, but it's honestly a bit of a waste of very high quality meat.
To state a more obvious thing: you can sell many croquettes, but selling larger portions of beef means you are gong to be involved in less transactions per yen. And the margins are going to be much better anyways.
Another thing that is true with more family oriented businesses is that the objective is often not to maximize profit. Of course people want sales, and healthy and stable businesses, but Japan in particular is rife with stories of something becoming very popular all of a sudden and the restaurant owner just gets overwhelmed and overall is negative on the extra business. This is probably the top point, the whole exercise of running a butcher is up to the personal whims of the people working there, and so often is not about min-maxing.
And they limit the number made each day. If the numbers given in the article are accurate, they're losing about $450 per day on ingredients for this loss-leader -- and for that price, they've bought fame around the world.
But how does this fame lead to future profit? Do people buy other things (which is profitable) when they can't get the apparently world famous croquette?
It is basically their marketing budget. You could at the same time ask how any advertising turns into profit.
Normal retail stores do this all the time. Sell something relatively cheap on a small loss to get you through the door and hope to make it up when you buy something else while you are there.
No, I get that, but if you can't actually buy the product, then how is it going to tempt anyone to buy anything else? Like with Costco's hot dogs, I might go in for a hot dog and buy other stuff. But if there was a 30 year waiting list for their hot dogs then I'm simply not going into Costco.
I think the real answer is it's a mom-and-pop meat shop and they are not growth oriented. Japanese things that are needlessly world-class and made by growth-avoidant producers is not unheard of.
They do it as a promotion and they believe that associated/follow up sales outweighs the cost.
Not mentioned in the article: it also got them on cnn and probably a lot of other news outlets. If you are a believer in “any promotion is good promotion”.
They got a lot of press coverage out of 200 daily croquettes.
There was a very popular info product I used to affiliate sell ~15 years ago, where the cost was $20, but they’d give you a $40 referral, because their follow up game was strong enough that they just saw it as paying $20 for qualified leads who were willing to get their wallet out.
Instead of raising the price, they could make them smaller. Then more people can enjoy them, the waiting list will shrink, and they'll make a profit...
If they were trying to be deep and say something "profound"about Japan maybe you'd have a point. This article is just surface level stuff. "Look at this fancy Japanese food."
It would be less racist if software engineers instead disliked Japanese things? I eat sushi, but I don't think it makes me an expert in Japanese culture. I don't think it's racist to like good food.
It was a cool article. I read it and was transported. So don't dunk.
In the tech singularity everyone is going to be VR anime characters, dragons, or furries or whatever anyway. Our own bodies are so done.
I was adopted at birth and didn't know my ethnicity until relatively recently [1]. The bullies in school used to call me a "bastard" before I knew what the word meant. Every uncomfortable interaction I had - not looking or being like either of my parents - made me feel alien. It shaped my perspective in a way few can relate to.
People make such a big deal about blood and skin. I never had that.
And as far as the Japanese culture comment goes, I studied Japanese for years and passed the JLPT N4 and almost took N3. Maybe that makes me weird too.
I don't watch anime, and I don't fetishise Japanese culture. But if I did, I don't know why it should matter. I know some "weird" adults with entire rooms dedicated to Disney fandom. Humans behave in interesting ways.
We won't be here for long, and I don't think we're attached to the blood past. Not more than the people we bump into that share our ride with us. These people alive and breathing today - they're your canvas and your story and your companions. Not the past. I didn't have one, and I'm making it up as I go along.
