If you remember when Pizza Hut had a salad bar, you’re probably familiar with the one plate/one trip rule. Customers who opted for the salad bar got one plate and one trip to the salad bar, so they wanted their visit to be worth it…….and was it ever. All of a sudden, people were posting instructions on social media to share the best ways to build "salad towers” higher and higher. There is, after all, an art to good salad stacking. A working knowledge of structural engineering was a bonus, allowing customers to build a solid foundation that would allow the salad to grow higher and higher. The strength of that foundation came from carrots, cucumbers and croutons. Salad stacking became somewhat of an art form, and the only way Pizza Hut could combat the ingenuity was to reduce the size of the salad plate to roughly the diameter of a tomato slice. Needless to say, they opted to simply get rid of the salad bar in their restaurants. Part of the pizza chain’s reasoning was that the food structures were wasteful if people didn’t finish eating them. Of course, the main reason is because customers paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 for the straight salad bar, or it came free with the $10 lunch buffet. That’s not much for salad that needs its own air traffic controller.
