I was thinking about this today: how much food does the American Girl Cafe and Bistro serve every year?
When Pleasant Rowland opened the first American Girl Place in Chicago in 1998, it served as the fulfillment of the American Girl vision: when she was brainstorming, she imagined a place for girls to go visit based on her historical doll line. This turned into an experience with shopping, a doll hair salon, a theatre (that eventually closed), and, of course, a cafe (or bistro in non-flagship locations). But the real question is: how much food does the American Girl cafe serve?
It's hard to get an actual answer. But I'm basing my calculations off of the number of daily reservations. We'll base this off of the pre-COVID capacity, so once social distancing ends, this will be accurate.
The smallest stores (normally) has reservations from 11 am to 6 pm, with reservations every 15 minutes. This is 28 reservation slots per day, and it is doubled for the cafes, with 56 reservation slots a day. There are three flagships with cafes, and ten stores that serve food. This means that there are 448 dining groups a day.
To make this simple, let's say an average of three people come in per group, as I spot groups of four and two at my local store (and I am an expert in American Girl stores.) That means AG serves 1344 people a day at stores nationwide.
A quick search online reveals an average meal is 1.2 pounds. This means roughly 1613 pounds of food are served at American Girl stores nationwide every day.
American Girl stores are typically open every day, with the exception of major holidays: Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. That's 362 days in the year.
1613 times 362 means that there are a whopping 583,833 pounds of food served at American Girl stores nationwide every year.
Isn't that wild? Nearly 600,000 pounds of food are consumed at American Girl stores every year. To put this in perspective, using the same calculation, an average human consumes 1314 pounds of food every year. It would take 444 years for an average human to consume what is consumed at the American Girl store every year. Or it would take 444 people to eat what is eaten at the American Girl store every year in one year. (An average year. Not 2020. Because 2020 is not an average year.)