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How to tell if a restaurant is ripping you off...

Ever wonder if you are getting ripped off by a fancy restaurant? Well, now there is an easy way t...
Newstalk
Newstalk

08.28 17 Feb 2015


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How to tell if a restaurant is...

How to tell if a restaurant is ripping you off...

Newstalk
Newstalk

08.28 17 Feb 2015


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Ever wonder if you are getting ripped off by a fancy restaurant? Well, now there is an easy way to tell.

A new study headed by Dan Jurafsky, a linguistics and computer science professor at Stanford University, has found that fancier restaurants and establishments tend to fill their menus with embellished words and terms in order to trick people into paying more.

According to the Independent, the report entitled The Language of Food was published in 2014 and looks at the prices on 650,000 dishes on 6,500 menus, using statistical tools to learn which words were associated with higher and lower prices.

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Seven cities were covered across the States for the study including Chicago, Boston and New York.

The report found that when restaurants used longer words to describe a dish, it charged more for the dish itself. In fact, each increase of one letter in the average length of words was associated with an increase of 18 cents in the price of the dish.

The report also found that expensive food was described in many cases in sexual terms such as orgasmic and seductive.

"Maybe people at these flashy restaurants are on dates and already thinking about sex," he suggested.


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