Last night after a long day of work I decided to order dinner online. I just didn’t feel like cooking, so I ordered pizza and wings from Stone Hot Pizza. I looked forward to their arrival. When I opened the bag, I found 8 chicken wings and a barely 2 “ by 1” container of ranch dressing! Fortunately, in the back of my refrigerator I found a jar of blue cheese dressing that had not passed its expiration date!
This is not the first time I have ordered food in the past couple of years and the sauce either wasn’t provided or wasn’t enough! My favorite Peruvian chicken place now charges $.50 for each additional small container of sauce and has cut down on the containers provided for free. Jets Pizza doesn’t even provide sauce, you have to order it separately. I found that out when I ordered chicken wings and they arrived without any dressing. Hangry Joes doesn’t provide sauce with their Korean nuggets anymore and only one small container with their chicken tenders! Even Chic-Fil -A makes it difficult to get sauce. I ordered a sandwich in the drive through and had to go back through to get sauce. I hadn’t asked for it! The only place I have found that still loads up your order with condiments and sauces is McDonald’s.
Used to be that all take-out restaurant provided you with all the sauce you wanted, often so much that it was wasteful. Although providing sauce does not come without cost, it is certainly not a major cost of a chicken tenders combo! So why are the take-out restaurants becoming so stingy with the sauce? I think that the answer is that rather than addressing inflation by raising the price of the meals themselves they are making us pay to get enough sauce for the meals. Who’s going to notice the increase in price for a meal when the price of the base meal stays the same? I think it is similar to making price increases by decreasing the size of the package but charging the same price; which has been done extensively during the past few years.
Hiding inflation by manipulative product price increases is not fair to the customer! Don’t pretend that the price of the meal has not increased when I have to pay at least an extra $1 to get sufficient sauce to go with it. Maybe even worse, don’t deliver ordered food when I don’t know that sauce won’t be provided; or there won’t be enough sauce; or I have to pay for sauce but no one told me. I am tired of saying,“Where’s the Sauce?”!