Saturday, March 12, 2011

The Burger King Value Meal Scam

So, when you order off the value menu at Burger King you must pay $.01 extra. Why? If you advertise something as being a “value” meal, isn’t that misleading when it costs more to purchase the “value” meal than if you just ordered everything individually?

Indicated on the menu for the individual items:

Double Stacker $2.00
Medium Fries $1.99
Medium Drink $1.89

Here’s my receipt. I think I can do the math here, taxes and all:




I put a red box around the phone number on the receipt just so you know, don’t bother calling that number because you have to be “invited” to make that call. You have to have an “invitation” code in order to take their “satisfaction survey”. They need to get a programmer to change this, take this phone number off the receipt and ONLY print it on the piece of paper that spits out the “invitation” code. You know?

I’ll get back to the word “value” now. Where is this added value? I think Burger King receives value in it, of course, because they get an extra $.01. With this extra $.01 they steal from their customers, they are that much closer to reaching their ROI for the user-friendly cash registers they purchase so they can cut back on the “training” time it takes to show the new guy how to operate something slightly more complex, their brain.

Next time I go to Burger King I’m NOT going to order the #11; I’m going to order a Double Stacker and when they ask me if I want the value meal I’m going to say, “No, but give me a medium order of fries and a medium diet coke.”

I can’t wait to hear, “Ma’am that would make it a value meal.” I’m just that ready to be a bitch about it.