The Condiment Conundrum

On a road trip my family and I stopped at McDonald's, which is always a nice road side treat. I ordered my usual McNugget meal with sweet and sour sauce and noticed there was an 11 cent charge for an extra sauce. Apparently McDonald's has a rationing system of their dipping sauces, but don't worry ketchup and mayo are still free. Note that the nugget dipping sauces are the most expensive, therefore making them the most elite, where as the rest of the sauces are 10 cents, such as ranch.

The system works as follows: a 3 piece Chicken Select awards one sauce, a 5 piece Select gets 2 sauces, a 6 piece McNugget 1 sauce and a 10 piece McNugget gets 2 sauces. Now, being I do not frequent McDonald's so I am not too keen on the chicken proportions when comparing the McNugget to the Select, but I do know that one dipping sauce for the 6 piece is stretching that sauce pretty far. When I was growing up it was as many sauces as you wanted, therefore I became used to frivolously using my various sauces on my meals. Looks like McDonald's is through with the sauce connoisseurs of America.

Something interesting I noticed after my first encounter of these signs, was the placement of them. If you are to stop at a rural/urban McDonald's there is a sign, but in more refined areas the signs are not as common. It makes one curious as to if McDonald's did research and found out that certain stores were using way too many sauces and therefore implemented the sauce policy at these stores.

Is it possible McDonald's is using this extra 10-11 cents per sauce package to research a more health -friendly approach to fast food, probably not, and I somewhat hope not. In the age of diets, organic food and meatless meatballs it is somewhat nice to have a haven one could escape to find the same french fries that have always been there. I mean people do love their McNuggets, just this year on January 5 2010, a woman straight up punched a McDonald's worker for not preparing her nuggets correctly. Apparently loosing weight and anger management were not high on this woman's list of New Year's resolutions.

The sauce charge is for those of us who were selfish about our sauces, and now the world is being punished for our actions. I would like to apologize for being a contributor to this condiment conundrum.

Photo courtesy of: consumerist.com