The Science of “Supersizing” it

A look at the beginnings of “supersizing” food and why people are more eager to eat more than necessary

Max N
5 min readMar 31, 2020

Whether or not you tried or have seen a super-sized meal, McDonald first used this term to get their customers to buy more of their food.

Don’t want to buy multiple burgers? How about we morph five burgers into one burger so you can have one supersize burger? Let’s look at the origins of the supersize.

Supersizing | the movie theater

A man named David Wallerstein worked for a chain of movie theaters in Texas.

Wallerstein tried to find ways to increase the sales of soda and popcorn in his movie theaters. He tried two-for-one deals and other specials but convincing the customers to buy more than one soda and popcorn was difficult.

He thought that people didn’t want to buy more than one of the same item. They worry that it will make them look greedy. Outside of looking greedy, people probably didn’t want to deal with the hassle and the effort of carrying multiple buckets of popcorn to their seats.

They’ll be that person that is constantly munching their popcorn and loudly slurping their drinks throughout the film. The film ends and the person has a…

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Max N
Max N

Written by Max N

A writer that writes about JavaScript and Python to beginners. If you find my articles helpful, feel free to follow.

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