A woman from Atlanta thinks she found something sneaky going on with Chick-fil-A prices. She was getting ready to order breakfast and saw that ordering at the drive-thru cost more money than ordering the same thing on the app.
J, who uses the name @thepurplepantman on TikTok, was planning to order her breakfast through the Chick-fil-A app at first. Then she changed her mind and went to the drive-thru instead. When she got to the window, her breakfast came out to $7.38.
That’s when she realized something didn’t add up. She checked and saw that the exact same order would have been 5 cents cheaper if she had stuck with ordering on the app. “It was 5 cents more through the drive-thru, to order it in the drive-thru, than it was to order it on the app. And that had me thinking,” she said in her TikTok video.
Could small price differences really matter that much?
Now, 5 cents doesn’t sound like a lot of money. But J started doing some math in her head and came up with a bigger picture. She talked about how people don’t think a 50-cent raise matters much, but if you add it up over a whole year, it becomes more than $1,000. She thinks the same thing could be happening with fast food restaurants.
Here’s what J thinks is going on. If Chick-fil-A has 500 customers come through every day, and each person pays an extra 5 cents without really noticing, that adds up fast. “What if they just charge everybody 5 cents? They get millions of dollars. They get millions of dollars, right?” she said. She calls this “penny laundering” and thinks a lot of companies might be doing it.
This kind of thing has shown up in movies before. In Office Space from 1999, some workers set up a computer program to take tiny amounts of money from lots of transactions. The movie Hackers from 1995 had a similar plot where someone stole small bits of money from tons of transactions to get rich. People sometimes call this “salami slicing” when talking about money schemes. Either way, she’s not the only Atlanta resident making waves online lately with observations about everyday experiences.
J’s video has been watched almost 430,000 times and lots of people had thoughts about it. A commenter named Mariah said, “I started penny pinching and my own income has expanded. So yes bestie, if the pennies add up for me, it’s adding up for them by the thousands.” Someone named Nicholas brought up how American Airlines once saved $40,000 just by taking one olive out of the salads they served on planes.
A lot of people in the comments were upset about what they see as companies being too greedy. Daija Danielle wrote, “I have literally been saying this. Then people are like you really that cheap. No they are really that greedy, y’all need to stop ignoring that.” Some people pointed out that this reminded them of Office Space. The conversation comes at a time when more folks are questioning how businesses handle payment expectations.
