Everything and everyone is getting bigger, and I blame the upsell.
Weâre all familiar with it, youâre hit with it seventy-leven times a day, whether or not youâre on the road. You order lunch and get asked, âDo you want extra meat on the sandwich? Would you like to upsize for a dollar? How about a heaping order of fat slathered french fries dipped in grease for another buck fiddy? Free heart attack with every tenth meal! Donât forget your gallon-sized soft drink and diabetes for dessert!â

Even buying fuel is fraught with danger. âWould you like to add a giant candy bar and energy drink to that for $3.99?â Two things come to mind when I hear that question â first, âWell hell, we just spent five hunnert dollars, why not?â Second one is, asking me if I want candy is completely rhetorical. Of course I want candy, son, put that Butterfinger in the bag and quit playinâ.
I donât mind an upsell when they make sense, but when theyâre just blatant attempts to get me to spend more money, I have to make note of it. Example: getting breakfast at a sit-down restaurant, I look for the eggs, bacon and toast meal on the menu, because thatâs all I want. They have a special listed, but it includes crepes with the bacon and eggs, instead of toast, and itâs $5.99. I donât want the crepes, George doesnât want the crepes, so I ask the waitress if I can have toast instead of crepes and she says no. They donât do substitutions. âYou can get the buffet for $10.99 and it has toast.â I check the menu and realize I can order the meal with the crepes and a side of toast for a dollar more. âIâll just take the special and a side of toast.â
She shakes her head like Iâve made a terrible decision. âYou only get two pieces of toast on a side order, you could have as much as you want from the buffet.â
Now, Iâm not great at math, but even I had a fairly immediate understanding that I could get eight pieces of toast and the meal I had in mind and could have ordered in two seconds if we hadnât started all this upsell business for the price of the buffet. I wanted toast, but I didnât plan on building a toast fort â two pieces was completely sufficient. I noticed her âTry our breakfast buffetâ promo pin, and instead of mathing with her, I politely declined and got exactly what I wanted for $6.99.
Hereâs the thing â if she had just said, âWe have a buffet thatâs $10.99 weâre pushing right now, and I get a bonus for selling it, but you could get the special and a side of toast for $6.99,â I probably would have ordered the buffet, because Iâve worked in restaurants, and I understand the pain enough to throw four bucks at a bonus for a waitress.
Unfortunately, you never get an upsell when it could actually be beneficial. Like at the shop youâre broke down in, somewhere between Timbuktu and Arkadelphia, âWould you like four hours of service time for the price of three with this incredibly expensive repair we just did?â or, âHow about a free shower to wash the vomit off yourself from when we told you how much this was going to cost?â
I kid. I understand itâs part of the retail job to upsell and most of the people doing it arenât nearly as enthused about it as management would like them to be. Itâs not their fault I have no will power when it comes to candy, but I will draw the line at toast. So thereâs that.