Pizza that can blow your mind

[Long Run]

Of course, if you always eat all of the pizza at one meal, then maybe the costs savings end up in another bottom line.

Why You Should Always Order the Large Pizza

Alex Van Buren
Feb 26, 2014
Today in pizza news: The wonderful nerds at Planet Money have been hard at work thinking about economics and… eating pizza. And thank goodness for that, because the result is one excellent graph.

Journalist Quoctrung Bui went out for a pie with an engineer friend who, he writes, ordered a “12-inch medium instead of the 8-inch small—because the medium was more than twice as big as the small, and it only cost a little bit more.” Bui, a mathematically inclined fellow, admits: “This sort of blew my mind.”

He took it upon himself to gather the stats, using an open-source statistics program called The R Project. Bui told us it took him three weeks to pull together numbers (using Seamless and GrubHub) from 3,678 pizza parlors (including 74,476 prices!) nationwide. The results, in visual format, are bound to make a person want to spend a extra few bucks for more grub: The findings across the board: always buy the bigger pie. The bigger the pizza, the cheaper the slice.

It’s akin to looking at the “price per sheet” breakdown in the fine print at the grocery store, and opting to lug home 24 rolls of toilet paper instead of four.

The best bit about the graph: It’s entirely interactive, so you can move a slide along its X-axis to find out how much money you might be saving by buying a bigger pie.

Nutritional impact of eating this much pizza aside, this is great news for bargain hunters everywhere. Bui tells us that Planet Money will release a new graph on February 27 mapping out the median pizza prices, by neighborhood (read: where to get the cheapest pie) in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Chicago. Though we’ve been sworn to secrecy till then, we’ll be keeping an eye out.

[rubato]

Getting the most food for the lowest price is not my goal in ordering in a restaurant.



Yrs,
Rubato

[dgs49]

Hate to throw muck in the water, but pizza is actually three dimensional, not two. Thus, the actual value should be based on CUBIC inches of food, not square inches. The thickness of the crust can vary greatly according to the parlor and the style ordered.

Due to the relative undesirability of the peripheral crust, I would not insist on the more complex calculation of greater volume at the periphery.

This guy has more work to do.

[Scooter]

A small, medium and large pizza at any given establishment are going to be more or less the same thickness, which means it is completely irrelevant to this pricing analysis. Reading comprehension can be a useful skill.

[Guinevere]

To be fair, my local delivery place offers thin crust as well as their "regular" crust, for the same price.

[dgs49]

"...3,678 pizza parlors..."

Read the fucking article. Different parlors, different thicknesses.

[Joe Guy]

If all large pizzas regardless of where they are bought are consistently a better deal than smaller pizzas offered at the same restaurant, how would thickness have any effect on the value? And how would seeing the same price break at over 3,000 restaurants make the data less valid?

It's not a comparison of one restaurant's prices vs another restaurant. It's a comparison of value vs size.

[Rick]

Crust is just flour and water hardly the most costly ingredient in any pizza.

So I figger they're calculating the square footage of the toppings which after all is the crux of the biscuit

[Joe Guy]

You're correct. It's not the crust of the biscuit. It's the topping on the biscuit.

[rubato]

"...3,678 pizza parlors..."

Read the fucking article. Different parlors, different thicknesses.

If it was a fucking article I might have read it. But an article about nasty pizza, I'm just not that into it.


yrs,
rubato

[Rick]

Eat a Peach