I sense I may have been too oblique and abstract in my last post, in which I suggested that burdening the customer with designing their own product is an abdication of the responsibilities of the producer. I've got an example that will help to concretize that perhaps a bit more:
There's an Asian restaurant in my area that gives customers two options: you can order an item from the menu (standardized product) or you can go to the stir-fry bar and pick out your own ingredients and sauces and hand them to a guy who will toss them into a wok for you (customized). I've never gone for the customized product here, and have seldom seen anyone else doing so.
The entire reason I go to a proper restaurant (not merely a QSR when I need to cram something in my guts to make them stop complaining) an pay a premium is because I value the skill of the chef - he has the expertise to know what ingredients to combine and in what proportions to make a "good" dish. The service that I am paying for is the expertise of a skilled professional who knows what he's doing and will make better choices for me than I am capable of making for myself.
In all fairness, some customers clearly feel otherwise. If no-one at all wanted the customized offering, the bar would have been taken down at some point and replaced with more tables - it's a huge waste of cash for the restaurant to chop up so much product and throw it away at the end of each day (which I hope is their practice) - so to my earlier point, different customers prefer different things, and it's probably wise for the restaurant to offer both extremes.
Another example is a chain I saw in Dallas, steakhouses where the patrons cook their own steaks. I can't say much about that place, as I never set foot in one and find the very notion laughable - but they're still in business, which means that a sufficient number of customers actually delight in this option.
But to the point ... if a restaurant merely provides ingredients and equipment, and customers must come up with their own recipe and cook their own food, then what value does the restaurant provide to its customers? They peel and chop the vegetables, start the fire, and that's it. Hardly worth the significant difference in price between a restaurant meal and cooking at home, and I sense that's part of the reason that there is a great revival of interest in home cooking.
And to go further ... if all restaurants were to move to this business model, how does one restaurant differentiate its service from that of the one next door? If the only difference is in the choice of ingredients, I don't see that as sustainable: if the only advantage you have over a competitor is that you have parsnips, and customers seem to value that difference, they can match your offering the next time they place a grocery order.
And as usual, I feel the need to state I'm not arguing for either extreme, though I do sense the pendulum has swung too far in one direction for certain offerings, to the point that providers fail to provide sufficient value. There is no single answer of how much of the design, and even the labor, in producing a product ought to be laden upon the customer - while I do like having some choices, I also expect a vendor to apply some expertise in identifying a product that suits my needs. It's their job, and it's what I'm paying them to do.
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