Burger King says I can have it my way. Well, that may be so, but I'm still paying for it as if I had it Jake's way.
See, I don't like too much on my sandwiches, whether they be burgers, chicken, fish, or whatever other manor of foodstuffs you'd purchase from any fast food establishment. Generally, I'll get a burger with cheese and lettuce, and that's it. (I'm not nearly as picky about this at Tarvis is, but a stray onion can really ruin a good burger in my opinion!) Yet my burger, light on ingredients but heavy on good old beefy integrity, costs the same as the guy next in line who got the meat patty with cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, ketchup, mustard, pickle, more mustard, and very likely horseradish. Hey, that guy got two mustards! I basically let him have mine and paid for it anyway!
So here's an idea I had back when I was a kid: everybody starts at scratch: $0.00. That's if you buy nothing. (Which really, then why are you at the restaurant to begin with?) Then, each beef patty costs exactly the same. Let's say $1.00 for argument's sake. The bun costs a bit to make as well, maybe another $0.27, and if you'd like it lightly toasted that's another $0.03. So everybody pays a basic $1.30 for a plain hamburger with a lightly-buttered bun. Then, you can add whatever the heck you want to it, but you pay for every little bit as it comes. The cost of the amount of whatever it is you're putting on your burger would be almost inconsequential, of course, so it's not like a burger with "the works" is going to run you $8.50 or anything like that (unless, of course, you're at Becks' Prime, in which case it is worth it), so the difference between my sandwich and yours will probably never top more than a dollar, but those dollars add up after awhile! It could be figured to the point where a burger with everything tops out at whatever the cost of a burger with everything is now, under the insufficient and corrupt "we'll make the poor allergic-to-tomatoes people pay for everyone else's ketchup" system.
Admittedly, the costs of some of these things would probably have to be levied just a bit, since if they kept the cost of "the works" the exact same as it is now and charged the rest of us less for every ingredient they are saving, they may end up a bit behind in overall profits, and I understand not wanting to lose profits, especially this day in age. Still, whatever increase would exist would still be pretty minimal, and I'm sure that over enough hours of hard negotiations a system could be developed that saw each of us paying for what food we eat and not for that which we will NEVER eat because it may kill us.
Or just ruin a perfectly good burger.
(Incidentally, does anyone remember the old Nintendo game "Burger Time"? Was there a story involved, or were we just crushing our enemies using gigantic hamburger parts?)
