I worked at a Pizza Hut dine-in restaurant back in the 90s as an assistant manager. We all hated the buffet. We always had people asking if we could put out certain pizzas on the buffet. Like they wanted their favorite pizza, not what was out there. But we had a pretty strict rule to follow regarding the buffet. And they'd always get pissed when we wouldn't do it. And it was inevitable that at least once a week, someone would order a pizza (not the buffet), but then want to pay the buffet price. The buffet was (I think) ~$4.00 back then. But buying a whole pizza was about double that or more. So yeah, they'd get all pissy when they'd get charged full price for a whole pizza, but wanted the buffet price on a normal pizza. And their reasoning was kind of dumb. They didn't want to eat the pizzas that's been sitting on the buffet all day (which they never were at our location, we always had a huge buffet crowd so the pizzas went quick), so they'd order a whole pizza themselves. And even though it was the same type that would be on the buffet, that didn't matter. If you order from the non-buffet menu, then you get non-buffet menu prices.
But I will say that we always had a good staff on hand M-F during buffet hours
1 Manager
1 Assistant manager
2 Shift runners (don't really know the role of these 2, they mainly ran the registers so management could do other stuff)
4 servers (1 handled the buffet, like putting out the pizzas, salad stuff, pastas; and the other 3 handled the rest of the floor)
2 cooks (1 cook was mainly responsible for making the buffet pizzas and the other was for making non-buffet orders)
The best thing about the buffet, to me, was the pastas. Well, mainly just the Cavatini. If I worked the closing shift, I always made myself one. Plus I could put in whatever meats and veggies I wanted.
I also liked working there because we had the jukebox and the video game. And at closing, we'd turn up the volume on the music and let it blast until we were done. And a couple times we forgot to turn the volume back down. So the next day when someone put money in to play a song, it'd start blaring loud as hell and scare the shit out of everybody. I got a few chuckles out of that one.