I have apparently gone down to one post a month. And I barely made it this month. And it’s not even a baking recipe with a story, just a random math thing I noticed at Starbucks…
I was at my local Starbucks (they’ve gotten me hooked because of their stupid rewards card program), and I felt like having an iced tea. So I looked up at the menu, and I saw that a tall (12 ounces) was $1.50, a grande (16 ounces) was $2.15, and a venti (24 ounces) was $2.65. I was about to order a grande, when I realized that something is very wrong here. If you look at the tall, it’s $0.50 for 4 ounces, or $1 for 8 ounces. So you would think a grande would cost less than $2. But that is clearly not the case. And so, being the Asian that I am, I went for the tall, since I didn’t feel like my bladder could withstand the volume of a venti. And I sat there, reading my book, basking in the satisfaction that I paid less per ounce than those suckers who got grande iced teas.
But you know, you would think that they would have scrutinized something as important as price at this Starbucks. They should really be pushing people to buy the bigger sizes. The additional cost of ingredients for a larger drink over a smaller one is negligible compared to the additional money they charge, and the amount of labor is the same. So it’s far more efficient to sell a bunch of large drinks than small ones, assuming your resources for drinks are basically limitless (which they should be if your Starbucks is well-stocked). So their pricing is completely baffling.
I had half a mind to point this out to the people there, in the hopes that they would make the grande iced tea cheaper. But then paranoia crept in, and I worried that they might raise the price of a tall to drive people toward the grande. And that paranoia, coupled with my fear of confrontation, kept my mouth shut.