Dear Food Service Industry

The United States of America has won two World Wars and sent the British packing as many times to ensure that we didn't fall victim to the barbarous metric system.  We have our own system of weights and measures, and until recently, it has worked just fine.  I am not sure how it has changed.  We as a people are fairly averse to change, in fact, and we like things as easy as possible.  That's why we have rascal scooters and those grabber things fat people use so they don't have to get off their rascal scooters. 

I recently called a local pizzeria and asked what specials they were running.  The mouth breather on the phone told me that they were selling large pizzas for $8.99 and I was really surprised at how cheap they were.  In fact, it made me question why I had stopped ordering from them a few years back.  Doubt crept into my mind, and I, being a brilliant tactician and belligerent pessimist, questioned the chain's sizing options.  Sure enough, wise beyond his years Greg from 2008 had stopped buying this pizza because of an ill fated incident where he realized that instead of small, medium, and large, this pizza shop had large, extra large, and extra extra large.  The phone monkey at the shop confirmed that this was still the case. $8.99 is a very nice price for a true "large" pizza.  However, when your large is a small, that price is awful and you are the devil.

You cannot call a pizza a large pizza if it is not the largest size you sell.  In the same vein, the smallest pizza you sell is a small.  There is no discussion on this matter.  There was no wonderfully quirky 1980's sitcom called "Large Wonder" about a deadpanning robot.  It was "Small Wonder", because she was a dainty kid robot, and it was also delicious play on words.  Calling a small anything else is a mockery of nature, and I will have no part in your blasphemy. 

Coffee shops are even worse.  They are not content simply defying the natural order by reordering the sizes.  They, as true agents of chaos, have decided to simply re-purpose words or simply invent them to denote different sizes.  If you can call a large a venti, I am going to pay you for that venti with eyelashes, because we've obviously entered a magical pixie world where we make up all the rules as we go along.