The Disturbing Reality of "Value Meals"

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]The combo menu is a staple of the fast-food industry. You can roll through the drive-thru of almost any one of the most popular American chains, say a number, and be given a bag of multiple menu items with a drink of choice. Yeah, can I get a number six, king-size, please? And while you may no longer be pressured to upgrade your meal to a mega jumbo size, thanks to the efforts of one alcoholic documentary filmmaker from the early 2000s, you certainly still have a variety of options in sizes to choose from. But, this is not always been the case. And in this video, we are going to dive into the history of meal deals, large-sized upgrades, and uncover some uncomfortable truths about the psychological hacks that the fast-food industry has been playing on consumers for decades. Our story begins with David Wallerstein, a man on a quest to conquer one of the seven deadly sins. He helped start Chicago's first TV station, WKBK TV. The station was the first to broadcast the Chicago Cubs, the Indy 500, and Notre Dame football. The success of his early career led him to becoming the first non-family member to hold the position of president at the Balaban & Katz movie theater chain. He was well-known and held with high regard in the entertainment industry. Walt Disney once called him a friend and a magnificent showman who could smell a hit or a flop through a 6-ft wall.

[00:01:21]Disney would send Mr. Wallerstein pre-releases of films like Mary Poppins to get his seal of approval before taking them to a public audience. He was a civic leader and famously refused to show blockbuster films on a reserved seating basis. He argued that allowing this practice to happen would raise the price of tickets, making it impossible for the general public to partake in movie magic, declaring, "Movies are for the masses." However, he was a businessman at heart, and he understood that in the movie theater game, the real money was not to be made inside of the margins on the markups for tickets.

[00:01:55]Rather, it was to be made behind the concession stand. So, he made it his personal mission to sell as many snacks as possible. He revolutionized the industry by being the first person to add butter to popcorn, ice to soda, and caramel apples. But, like any other highly ambitious business person, he was never satisfied. He used every trick in the book to try and sell more units of popcorn. He offered matinee specials, two-for-one deals, and combos, but none of these attempts worked. He finally had a Newtonian apple moment when he realized that it was one of the deadly sins keeping people from buying more popcorn. Gluttony was why none of his previous attempts were working. All of the prior sales methods required people to get a second bucket of popcorn, and no one wanted to look like a glutton, you know, because it's a sin. So, he tried something that at the time was unprecedented. He offered an upgrade to a large-size bucket. This happened to also be an almost perfect business decision because he didn't have to increase his labor cost. The popcorn cost next to nothing. He did have to buy large buckets, but the container itself was the most expensive part of this equation. Movie patrons, they loved it.

[00:03:05]Sales for popcorn upgrades started to go through the roof, and this also increased sales for soda because they were more thirsty from the increase in salt consumption. And shortly after this innovation, he was poached by Ray Kroc, the founder of the McDonald's Corporation, and he retired from the theater industry. Now, this is just my opinion, but one of the reasons I think that sharing the history of corporations is so important is because every single one of these companies is led by a highly ambitious but insane person. The kind of person that if you put them into the middle of the woods with an axe, they would just start chopping wood, and they would not stop until they cleared all of the trees or passed out from exhaustion, whichever comes first.

[00:03:47]Wallerstein was clearly one of these people. So, as you listen to the rest of the story, keep that in mind. He's probably not an evil genius. He's just a man possessed to win at all cost. This type of ambition can yield great results if it's pointed in the right direction and given proper boundaries, usually in the form of regulations and laws.

[00:04:08]>> And in the late '60s going into the early '70s, the time when Wallerstein started working at McDonald's, there were certainly no laws or regulations that prevented fast food companies from tricking customers into eating more food. In fact, this period in time was marked by a weak economy, high food prices, and inflation. McDonald's was struggling. Customers, when they would come in, would cherry-pick items from the menu, ordering a single cheeseburger, just a sack of fries, or a soda, both of which only came in one size at the time. Wallerstein tried convincing Kroc to use the same methodology from the movie theater business by offering a large upgrade.

[00:04:41]The founder didn't like this idea, claiming that his fast food company had a wholesome image and it would cheapen the brand if they started running promotions encouraging customers to upgrade their meals. So, all McDonald's were instructed to continue offering [music] an a la carte menu and only one size for fries and drinks. That was until Wallerstein went out to the streets of Chicago to perform an experiment. [music] He went from McDonald's to McDonald's ordering a soft drink and sitting for hours like a nature documentarian, watching the wild animals, which in this case were McDonald's customers, [music] and he came to the same conclusion that he'd reached at the theater. The fear of being seen as gluttonous was holding them back. So, he went to McDonald's [music] HQ to have a meeting in a padded room with Mr. Kroc. The padded room existed because it was pretty common for these arguments to turn into shouting matches. So, during one of these legendary arguments inside of the padded room, Kroc finally surrendered to Wallerstein when Wallerstein said, "Ray, they are literally licking ketchup off of the bags and the wrappers, turning the fry bags into salt slides. These people are ravenous and desperate. They are looking for any excuse to eat more, more, more.

[00:05:52]And I know what you're thinking. What is a salt slide? It's the term that David Wallerstein came up with to describe the motion of taking the nearly empty bag of fries and dumping it into your mouth.

[00:06:03]Now, I'm not going to sit here and act like I've never done this before, but I don't think I can ever do it again. If I were to be in the car with my wife on a road trip and I turned to her and said, "It's time to take a ride down the salt slide. Whee!"

[00:06:18]She'd probably divorce me and I wouldn't blame her. It's so gross. It's so so gross. Putting aside the weird terminology for now though, let's move on with the rest of the story. After their meeting when Wallerstein got his way, an option to upgrade the size of fries was added to the McDonald's menus.

[00:06:36]This idea was an instant hit. However, it would take more than another decade before we would see the rollout of a McDonald's value menu at least on a national level.

[00:06:46]>> [music] >> Max Cooper, who you might be familiar with if you're into McDonald's lore, as he is a franchisee icon. [music] He's the man behind the popularization of the Big Mac jingle, first using it to promote a combo meal that he called Big Mac and Company. Cooper owned an estimated 45 stores and [music] he ran the promotion at all of these locations that were primarily located in and around Alabama. I say estimated when talking about how many stores he owned because that's what his obituary in the Chicago Sun-Times said. Apparently, that's just what happens when you're incredibly wealthy. They can't even keep count of how many restaurants you own.

[00:07:21]For me, my obituary, it'd be pretty easy. John Coen, owner of zero things, lots of debt. But, even with the success of Cooper's combo meal deals, the company did not initially adopt the concept at all of their stores. The value meals at Cooper's restaurants were successful, but the profit margins were still slimmer than having customers order all It would take a few more years before another innovation in understanding [music] customer psychology would convince corporate to roll out the concept of value meals nationally. [music] In the mid-80s they did experiment with something called bonus fries and in 1987 [music] there was a summer promotion where we saw the first use of the word super size and that was followed up with another short promotional run during the 1988 Who Framed Roger Rabbit collaboration, but combo meals wouldn't become a mainstay of the brand until 1991 after the company received a great deal of criticism from market experts for being the only fast food company without a value meal. When I was researching for this video, I kept thinking about the Isaac Newton quote, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." And while this quote is usually thrown around whenever someone achieves something that hasn't overall positive effect on society, I do think it's worth noting that this is also true for things that maybe aren't so great. Our food system for example and the health of this country, that wasn't changed overnight. Most of the problems that we have are systemic and those systems were built brick by brick, decision by decision. David Wallerstein, he just wanted to sell more popcorn. So, he came up with the option to upgrade to a large size. Did he know the impact this would have on the health of Americans? Maybe not. Probably not.

[00:08:55]But, you can easily make the argument that when he was the president of the theater chain, the problem with food consumption in America at that time, it wasn't even about overeating. Rather, it was about how to get enough food in the first place. This was after all the era that was still remembering the shared trauma of the Great Depression.

[00:09:12]Overeating and how to be healthy, that was part of the cultural conversation, but it played a much smaller role than it does now. But, by a few decades later, this was no longer the case. The original pioneers of the value menu, they knew better, but they went for it anyway. During the '80s, Taco Bell was doing well enough, but they did have a hard time getting repeat business and they wanted to start getting repeat customers because [music] they were finally ready to start competing in a real way with a corporate juggernaut McDonald's. So, they hired a young marketing genius named Elliot Bloom who immediately got to work and noticed something surprising. The American consumer was actually sick of the typical burger fare offered at convenient quick food purveyors. So, they acted on the advice of Bloom and launched a $200 million assault on their enemies. A series of commercials were filmed with the most popular one being an ad showing a man about ready to jump off of a ledge. He was sick of eating burgers. This ad also shows them shredding real cheddar and cooking ground beef in a pan, [music] which is something Taco Bell actually did at every restaurant back then and we'll soon learn why they stopped doing this.

[00:10:20]This campaign also saw the launch of new menu items like the taco salad that sold okay, but the company still had the same problem. People just weren't coming back a second time. Elliot Bloom, the marketing guy we've been talking about, he was running experiments in the form of surveys from the moment he was first hired at Taco Bell. But after this failed attempt to convert new guests into loyal returning customers with new menu items, he narrowed his focus to a group of consumers marketers call heavy users. A heavy user is a customer that frequents a restaurant more than a certain number of times a month.

[00:10:51]>> [music] >> The number of visits per month that classifies someone as a heavy user changes across industries, but there are reports that McDonald's classifies customers who visit three to five times [music] a week as super heavy users. And I don't know when this term originated, but it seems pretty clear that fast food marketers started using it primarily in the 1980s. [music] And what Bloom discovered from surveying this group of customers is something that was at first shocking to the company, but it would go on to change not only their business model, but the entire fast food industry indefinitely.

[00:11:23]As we just saw in one of the commercials, Taco Bell's company culture was centered around the quality of their kitchens. They made food on site and focused a lot of their energy on quality and presentation. But this attention to detail, it didn't seem to matter very much to the heavy users. The heavy users, time [music] and time again, reported that the main driving factor in them returning, it was value. And since 70% of the company's sales came from this group, it only made sense to try and increase the number of heavy users.

[00:11:54]Initially, the corporate office was resistant to the idea of discounting food. They thought this would do nothing but lower the check average, and that's exactly what it did at first. But this did not last long. Within only 7 days of offering discounts to people at test locations, they reported that the check average went back to normal. Meaning that people who were normally getting three tacos for $1, they started getting four tacos for that same dollar.

[00:12:20]More tacos on your tray or a heavier carryout sack felt like a value to these people. And this value turned more and more of these customers into heavy users. Taco Bell eventually remodeled all of their stores to focus on making more food faster. And the company grew sales from $1.6 billion annually to $3.4 billion over the next 8 years. The success inspired other fast food companies to follow suit. And here's the saddest part, at least in my opinion. Before this value epiphany, 70% of the square footage in their stores was occupied with heavy-duty kitchen equipment because they made everything on site.

[00:13:00]The company would then go on to spend the next 10 years flipping the equation around. Food started being made in factories and vacuum sealed and then shipped to locations instead of being prepared fresh on site. [music] And the giant kitchens, they were all downsized. Now in Taco Bell's, 30% of the store's kitchen while the remaining 70% of square footage is used for dining. Other fast food restaurants not only followed in Taco Bell's value meal footsteps, but they started doing the same [music] thing with food production.

[00:13:26]McDonald's was the last chain to adopt this practice, but under the direct supervision of, as you guessed, David Wallerstein, they made up for lost time by launching Dino-sizing as a part of a Jurassic Park collaboration. Dino-sizing would then go on to become what is now the iconic Super Size, and we all know how that story ends. McDonald's Super Size serves as a literal and figurative representation of what happens when greedy business people are too preoccupied >> with Whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

[00:13:58]There have been countless experiments done on the effects of being exposed to larger portion sizes and how this affects what you perceive as normal. One study that I found that I'll link in the description, it shows the effects of participants being exposed to different size plates of spaghetti. [music] Participants were asked to choose their ideal portion size from a series of images, and in the groups where they were first shown images of giant portions, this would affect the average [music] size selected. So, basically, if you go to a fast food restaurant, just by being exposed to images of value meals and super mega size sodas, you're more likely to order a larger portion than you otherwise would have without those images being present. Value meals not only serve as a way to turn occasional restaurant goers into heavy users, they also act like visual anchors to warp a customer's perception of what normal is.

[00:14:46]And if you've ever wanted to measure your portions or to count calories, don't let anyone call you crazy for doing this because we literally live in a world where our perception of what normal is is constantly being manipulated and toyed with. All right, that's it for this video, and since you're here at the end, I would love it if you hit subscribe, so that way one day I can get a YouTube plaque, and hopefully my kids will think I'm cool.

[00:15:09]And if you like learning about the psychology that marketers use to try to hijack our brains, I think you'll love this story and this video, and thanks again so much for watching, and I'll see you again soon. Peace.