I usually ask for short black. Coffee, I mean.
]]>When figuring out the value of a particular item, instead of trying to figure out it's actual value to us, we try to compare with some other known item. This sounds perfectly rational, but...
...People were asked to write down their the last four digits of their social security number or telephone numbers, and then estimate the price of several items. The people who had higher social security/telephone numbers, (on average) estimated the prices of the products to be higher.
When Starbucks came along, they recognized that people had a pretty good notion of how much small, medium, and large cups of coffee cost, and they knew that they wanted to charge a lot more. In order to break the comparison with their coffee, then invented the tall, grande, venti system so that consumers would have a more difficult time mapping the prices, and they also imbued the terms with "premium" connotations. Thus, a tall is not a small, and costs three times as much, and the consumer feels no pain as they are being ripped off.
Anyway, this is a long way of saying that your intuition is correct.
]]>Warning: Definitely not work safe... gratuitous use of foul language used to illustrate their point.
]]>Warning: Definitely not work safe... gratuitous use of foul language used to illustrate their point.
]]>Actually, Starbucks does have a small. They don't advertise it, but they do have a small cup size. So, there is something smaller than Tall, but I'm guessing your latino-themed coffee bar wasn't in the loop.
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