McDonald’s – Not My Kinda Place

Fast food restaurants are notorious for their cheap eats.  You’ll find $1 hamburgers, cheap chicken nuggets, frugally priced french fries – things that would be a value deal for most families.  The one thing that never made any sense to me in this “fair deal” environment was the price of sodas at these fast food places.  For what they charge for a large soda, you could easily buy a 2 litre soda at the grocery store, take your fast food home, and drink the flavor soda you like.

I do not drink soda, and as a result, I almost never buy soda for my house.  My kids act like it’s Christmas when, after a party or a houseful of company, we have soda left over that I let them finish off.  You will almost never be able to go to my refrigerator and grab a cold soda, because even when I have company, I buy bags of ice and keep the valuable fridge space for important things, like my mother’s potato salad.  As a result, my lazy children, who will go get themselves a can of soda, are used to drinking it at room temperature because they are never motivated enough to fill a glass with ice and pour the soda over it.  Where did these kids come from?

Whenever I take my kids out, they order their drinks without ice.  They’ve grown to prefer it that way – Granuaile especially.  She hates ice in her soda, probably more so because she often leaves her drink and comes back to it later, when an ice filled drink would now be watered down and nasty.  When you go into places like McDonald’s, you can get your own drink, so it never occurred to me that my kids were in some way taking advantage of good old Uncle Ronald by grabbing soda without ice.  I mean, you can go back and refill your drink to your heart’s content.

But did you know that if you go through the drive through of a local McDonald’s and ask for your kids meal soda without ice, they will charge you EXTRA?  It’s .10 more for a soda without the ice in the drive through, even though a kid can refill a cup inside a dozen times without paying any more.

Who instituted this policy?

This is certainly never going to break me.  It’s a dime. (although, I have learned that it goes as much as .89 upcharge to order a drink with no ice).  But honestly, it’s a principal thing at this point.  Why are you going to charge me a few extra pennies to get a full cup of soda in the drive through, but let me get as many full cups of soda as I want inside without penalizing me?

We are always talking about making our last fast food visit really our LAST fast food visit.  This may be just annoying enough to motivate me to stick with it this time.