[Sca-cooks] Marzipan 8 track tapes

[Siegfried Heydrich]

    Down here, the kingdom lives in absolute dread of not selling out feast,
and losing money. Kingdom law (or the Autocrats handbook, which is pretty
much the same thing) limits food budgets to $6 or $7 a head for the event
(double that for 4 day events). Breakfast on both saturday and sunday are
mandatory, lunches are optional.
    They've also been limiting the number of seats to a maximum of 150,
which is a major annoyance - the hall we use could probably seat 500, and
I've served 300 in there without difficulty. This is for kingdom events, of
course, local events are under no restrictions. Dayboards have been done for
lunch, but I stopped doing it when I would put out food, and everything was
gone in a half hour. It was really annoying when people who'd paid for food
went hungry while the freeloaders pigged out. <grumble>
    Folks here have simply gotten out of the habit of eating feast. Part of
it has been erratic quality, part of it has been long, boring, drawn out
meals, part of it is fear of trying anything more exotic than a Big Mac, and
a lot of it has simply been that it's not been available to the majority of
the populace.
    Attendance for the big kingdom events runs around 800 or so staying on
site, and another 500 - 800 daytrippers. (the site we use is within a 3 hour
drive of 2/3 of the populace). So, under kingdom law, less than a fifth of
the populace on site has the option of feast. As a result, household feasts
have become the norm, or people going off site, or just going home. I've
made numerous suggestions to kingdom as how this can be addressed, but the
fear of losing money prevents kingdom from taking any corrective measures.
And feast becomes harder and harder to sell . . .
    My household set up our tavern to pick up a lot of the slack and relieve
pressure on the feastie beasties. We stop serving at least 3 hours before
feast - if we started selling dinner, most people would stop eating feast
completely. We have a LOT of people asking us to stay open for dinner, but
I'm not going to compete with the kingdom for feast seats. We're a service,
not a competitor.

    Sieggy

----- Original Message -----

> > To start off the discussion on Marzipan 8 Track Tapes, what is the
opinion
> > of the collective on this format and, more importantly to me as an
> autocrat,
> > do you think limiting the size of the feast to less than half of the
> > projected attendance will cause much wailing and gnashing of the teeth?
> >
> > regards, Puck