To continue and beat to death the unlimited breadsticks analogy, I see it as the restaurant offers unlimited breadsticks 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Customers who want this unlimited breadsticks have to pay a little bit more than those who don't want to eat that much.
Some times during the day the restaurant is very busy, and some times it may only have a few customers. But for the most part the restaurant has enough servers to serve breadsticks as fast as each customer can consume them--although parts of the day the servers can barely keep up, and sometimes they are a little short staffed.
Customers love the unlimited breadsticks. In fact there are customers who come in and order like 25 breadsticks each day--after all, they are paying a bit more for the privilege of unlimited breadsticks, so why not take advantage of it?
So, the restaurant realizes that their breadsticks are real popular and they love all the business they are getting, but they really don't want to keep so many servers on staff--or add servers to account for the customer demand. The restaurant decides that, once a particular customer has ordered 500 breadsticks in any given month the servers are directed to slow down the delivery of breadsticks to that customer so that the customer is only able to get one or two a day. For those customers who eat 25 breadsticks a day they notice their servers start getting real slow around the 20th day of the month--in fact, for the last 10 days of every month service really sucks!
Now, the restaurant's original purpose for implementing the plan was to reign in the amount of money it's paying for its servers, but the restriction of breadsticks to these particular customers is carried out regardless of the time of day or how busy the restaurant is. It doesn't matter whether they have plenty of servers to serve a particular customer, if that customer has already eaten 500 breadsticks that month, service to them needs to slow down.
So, if one does the math, for those customers who normally eat 25 breadsticks a day and who pay a bit more for the privilege to do so, if the policy was truly unlimited they would be able to eat 750 breadsticks a month. But, once the restaurant implemented the new restriction (4 years after it started offering the promotion) those customers are now only allowed to eat 520.
It seems then that the number of breadsticks the customer is allowed to eat, and the speed by which the breadstricts are served to these customers are restricted--so, is that really unlimited? I don't think so, but I'm fully aware and respect those who believe otherwise.
Z
