Fast food restaurants have become very good at separating you with your money. They actively train their employees to up-sell customers to more expensive products and suggest additional menu items they might want to have in addition to their meal. If you go to Burger King, they’ll frequently ask you if you’d like to “Go Large” on that. At McDonalds, they’ll suggest a couple of delicious Apple Pie’s to go with your meal. Each restaurant has their own versions of up selling, but they all do it, and it works! Perhaps the most frequent attempt at an up-sell in a fast food restaurants is asking customers if they would like to “super-size” their meal. It’s a rip off.

First let’s consider how much unhealthier getting your meal is getting because it’s large sized instead of medium. Just for a medium sized Big Mac Meal with a coke, you’re already consuming 1140 calories, that’s about half as much as most people should be eating in their entire day, when you bump it up to a large size, you’ll now be consuming 290 extra calories! Yuck! No one should be consuming 1,430 calories for one meal, with maybe the exception of a delicious Thanksgiving dinner. Fast Food is already unhealthy enough, you don’t need to make it worse by going large size!

Let’s also consider what you are getting for your extra fifty cents. You’re getting 2 more ounces of French fries, and a slightly larger beverage, that’s it. You get the exact same sandwich in every fast food restaurant there is. When you consider that every fast food restaurant gives you the free refills, you’re not getting any more pop. You’re getting a larger cup, which might make sense if you are taking the food to go, but that’s about it!

In essence, you’re paying 50 cents for two more ounces of heavily salted French fries. Most of the time people don’t even finish their French fries and let half of them go to waste. Who can blame them? Nobody wants to eat cold soggy French fries, so why would one buy French fries that they aren’t going to eat anyway?

“Biggie Size”, “Super Size”, “Large Size” and the like are not adding any additional value to the customer, but rather further increasing the profits of the fast food industry and further fattening the belly of the people who eat at these restaurants. Just say no to super-size.