I would say that method A is marginally more convenient than method B, but both are far more convenient than method C. Simply because in order to use method C you either have to have the Internet available with you on a mobile device, which is still not that common among the general public, or you have to have the foresight to look it up at home before you go out.
Depends on if you consider the drive-thru menu the point of purchase or the window the point of purchase, since the window is where the exchange of money happens, and where you can ask for the pamphlet with the nutritional information.
And more importantly, the pamphlet has nutrition information, not just a bare calorie count, which is so partial as to be nearly useless in making a truly informed decision.
What’s to analyze? I rather doubt that they’re going to include all the usual nutrition details such as fat (saturated and non), carbohydrates, proteins, sugars, etc. All that needs to be added is the total caloric content, a single number. Then, when you’re looking at the menu, you can either blissfully ignore it because damn it, you just want a triple stack with bacon, or you can glance at it and go “Holy crap, the fish sandwich has twice the calories as the burger. Guess I’m getting the burger,” in much the same way you might go “Holy crap, the fish sandwich is $3 more than the burger.”
Now, yeah, if you want to know what has the least cholesterol, you should get out of line to where you can read the detailed info. But having the calories on the menu is a quick guide that’s as useful to people as the price of the food. We certainly don’t say “You should be able to reason out that the double patty melt is more expensive than the grilled chicken sandwich. If you want to know the price, go inside and stop holding up the line.”
So why not have the nutrition pamphlet and a calorie count on the menu? I’m still not seeing the downside of a menu calorie-count.
People are missing the real benifit of this: It gives fast food companies an incentive to care about shaving calories. Sure, before, calorie information was on cards & websites but not enough people had access to the information for changes in calories to have any effect on buying patterns. Now, if you can reformulate your dish and cut out 50 or 100 calories without affecting taste, then it becomes a good business decision because it’ll lead to increased sales. 50 calories here, 100 calories there, pretty soon, you’re talking real weight loss.
I find it rather implausible that this would ever come to shutting down a restraunt. It would simply be a matter of the gov saying “change your menus”, the restraunt saying, “why?”, the gov saying, “because we’re an interfering nanny state and we say so”, and the restraunt owner saying, “fine, be that way,” and adjusting his menu-printing schedule slightly.
At most (but not all) of the drive-throughs I’ve been through, you place your order prior to arriving at the window, through a speaker. This is when you make your purchasing decision, and when you need to have any information that you are going to use in making your choice. At that point, there is no pamphlet. Only a menu billboard.
And as for the calories alone being too uninformative for you, one could have a different debate about precisely what nutritional information is most necessary or useful. We can’t put everything on there, after all - space does eventually become a consideration. And while it could be argued either way, if the current decision is to require calories alone, that seems like a reasonable start to me. (What’s not reasonable is asserting “it must be all the info or nothing”.)
Everyone realizes it. The supporters are just denying that it’s important to them.
I knew I should have added a “threaten to” before “shut down your restaurant.” Rest of the post still stands.
It never crossed my mind that there would be secondary market effects encouraging the restraunts to alter their offered food choices. I guess I don’t think a large enough percentage of people would change their habits significantly due to the extra information. (Though the people who would change their habits should have the information given to them.)
Even now that the idea of such secondary benefits has been mentioned, it’s still not important to me, though I guess I don’t mind the idea.
I meant I find it implausible it would even come down to threatening to shut down the restraunt. It’s utterly inconceivable to me that a restraunt would let it go further, and get itself shut down over a menu, after all.
And seriously, what rest of the post? Like I said, it would simply be a matter of the gov saying “change your menus”, the restraunt saying, “why?”, the gov saying, “because we’re an interfering nanny state and we say so”, and the restraunt owner saying, “fine, be that way,” and adjusting his menu-printing schedule slightly. Any restraunt that might consider taking it further than that will have already been at war with the gov over the numerous other regulations on restraunts (“Hairnets? We don’t need no stinkin’ hairnets!”) and would be closed for other reasons than their menu.
Was there this level of objection to packaged food labeling when it was introduced?
Whether the owner sticks to his guns long enough for the government to shut him down is irrelevant. The threat to do that (or something similarly severe) is still there. It’ll start with a fine, but what if you refuse to pay that fine? It escalates, until the punishment is worse than the loss of freedom. Hell, you don’t even need a credible threat from the government to make them comply with their demands, even in matter far more serious than printing nutrition on restaurant menus. People are routinely talked into “voluntarily” giving up their fourth and fifth amendment rights.
Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that the state is an extremely potent force. We ought to have strong justification for invoking that power. This law will accomplish so little, I can’t imagine what a strong justification for it would be.
Nobody will stick to their guns - there’s no reason to. And if they’ve lasted this long they’re used to the idea that restraunts are regulated in this country. It’s a fact of life here.
You are seriously blowing this way out of proportion.
(I should note that if you’re a small-government libertarian, that’s your priviledge, but you can’t argue as though everyone has that perspective. It’s utterly unconvincing unless you can first convince us that govenment itself is a problem.)
I doubt it for a couple reasons, primarily related to the fact that the internet wasn’t around then. One, information wasn’t as easily accessible, so taking that step would likely have seemed reasonable. Two, there wasn’t as large a public space to bitch about it. 
I can respect the conservative viewpoint here, though. If legislation isn’t actually necessary, don’t go through with it. It is arguable that this particular legislation isn’t really necessary and is one of those wasteful bills, true. After all, we’re not starting from a position of “no information at all;” the info is out there and available to people who know to look for it.
I suspect (rather, hope) there have been studies done to see whether people respond better to having the information right there in front of them rather than simply available with some effort. If it’s a significant difference in effectiveness, I can see the reasoning for this legislation.
I didn’t say government is a problem, I said it is powerful. I said that the use of such power should be justified and carefully considered. The only justification put up by most posters (that nutritional information is otherwise difficult to access) has been shown to be false. That’s it.
In fact, such studies have been done. One was referenced in the OP (reproduced below). Having the calories in their face was completely ineffective.
I’m not even slightly convinced that the idea nutritional information is otherwise difficult to access has shown to be false, largely because the arguments that it is easy to access generally suck, either being based on nonuniversal conditions (McDonalds has posters, but not everyone does) or ones that presume that the person has special resources (internet-ready cell phone) or that the customer does advance research before choosing their purchase (look it up at home) or avoids the more convenient courses of action (go inside instead of using the drive through). And when one of these crappy arguments, another is dragged up. The amount of dodging around here that is being done to pretend that there isn’t even a hint of a problem here is amazing, really.
If somebody took the honest position, that yeah, people would be more informed about the nutritional information if it was on the menus, but you don’t feel that that’s a sufficient benefit to merit the law, then I would respect that a lot more. Trying to argue that there’s no problem at all smacks of a willingness to distort reality to get support that makes me doubtful of the veracity of any position such people present.
Personally I think a good has been done just by making the information more readily available. I dunno about anyone else, but that is the prize here; I don’t give a crap if nobody else but me actually uses the info.
Permit me to :smack:.
Are you seriously claiming that if I walk in to the nearest Burger King and poll all 30 people standing in line, that the overwhelming majority of them will be able to access the nutrition information while standing in line as quickly as you did sitting at home on your computer?
The upside is that consumers are better informed. Here’s what the study says:
(Italics mine)
So the customers actually made use of the information. Whether or not it resulted in any health benefit is tangential.
This is not such a shock in a fast food restaurant where the majority of the menu items are probably all in the same ballpark of fattening. If I see that a Whopper provides me 670 calories, what alternatives do I have? An Angry Whopper at 880 calories? A Stacker at 620? A Steakhouse Burger at 950? No wonder the study found that there was no significant change in calories purchased. Maybe if this study had been done at a restaurant where there is a decent section of the menu devoted to healthier choices, we might have seen some health benefits realized.
And before you suggest a BK Salad, here they are:
TENDERCRISP® Garden Salad - 670 calories
TENDERGRILL™ Garden Salad - 460 calories
And those look tiny. Somebody walking into a BK looking for a meal probably isn’t going to switch to a small salad even when he’s informed of the nutritional information of their burgers. Only somebody walking in with the intention of buying a salad is actually going to buy a salad.
We must be participating in different conversations, because the only place that anyone has demonstrated that you can’t get info before placing your order, even without special resources, is in the drive through.
To both of you: my claim is that anyone who actually cares, even the tiniest amount, about finding the info can find it. Easily. There’s not enough benefit to shoving said info into everyone’s noses to justify a law.
Alright then, let’s do some science. First, it’s well documented in the psychological literature that people routinely mis-attribute the influences in their decision making. This is why the study looks at calories purchased in addition to asking them whether the calorie counts influenced their choices. And sure enough, when you look beyond the illusions people hold about themselves, you see that calorie counts didn’t affect their choices at all.
Second, the study methodology says “Every customer possible was approached as he or she entered the restaurant during our designated survey periods. Customers were asked to bring their receipts back and to answer a set of questions for compensation of $2. Subjects were not told why the receipts were being collected.” So we know that the very same people who claimed to be influenced by the calorie counts did not change their purchasing decisions.
Now, regarding your analysis of why they didn’t see a difference in calories purchased. They cite a few previous studies in their paper. The first of these, conducted at Subway restaurants after they voluntarily posted calorie information on their menus, found that customers decreased their intake by an average of 52 calories. Note that this number is well within the range of Burger King sandwiches that you posted. The second study “us[ed] random assignment of consumers in a nonrestaurant setting found that menu labeling did not decrease calories ordered or consumed, even among those who reported noticing the calorie information. In fact, that study found some evidence that males ordered more calories when labels were present.”
Finally, if you look at the actual data collected, you will see that the average number of calories purchased actually increased from 825 to 846 as a result of the labeling. This change, however, was below the level of statistical significance.
If you want to see the actual study, look here (pdf).
Dude. You didn’t even address the points in the section of text you quoted, except to mention and then dismiss the problem of the drive through. This is why we’re participating in different conversations: you’re pretending large chunks of my side of the conversation isn’t happening.
The other main difference between our conversations is that I’m not pretending that all methods of acquiring the information are equivalent. Any method that requires that you get to the counter before getting your information (like, asking for a pamphlet) has a very very strong incentive not to use it, because if you do you can’t make your meal choice in advance like everyone else and instead have to either hold up the line deciding what you want, or get out of line after getting the pamphlet and go through it a second time.
Issues of relative difficulty and inconvenince are inconsequential if your goal is to prevent people from making informed purchasing issues, but if you do not have a vested interest in maintaining consumer ignorance, then these issues matter.
And anyone who cares, even the tiniest amount, can scale Mount Everest. What’s that you say? I’m using excessive hyperbole and exaggeration to make the problem massive? Guess what: you’re doing the same thing to make it nonexistent. In reality, the amount of effort and planning and inconvenience it takes to gather nutritional information prior to making your purchasing decisions is neither titanic nor negligible.
Whether that fact is enough to merit a law or not, on the other hand, is an entirely subjective question. After all, even if we managed to cut out all the slanting and hyperbole and talk each other into agreeing about the level of difficulty and inconvenience that gathering the nutritional information prior to ordering entails (which would be no small feat), that agreement doesn’t mean that we’ll also agree that that agreed-upon level of inconvenience merits a law. At that point, I think that the only way we could resolve the matter would be pistols at dawn.
What, exactly, do you want me to address? You’ve listed five different ways that a person can get nutrition information, which collectively cover all situations except in the drive through. So what is the problem? Are you bothered by the notion that a problem can be solved in multiple ways? Or the fact that different solutions may have pros and cons, depending on your specific situation? You wrote some posts back that “[w]hat’s not reasonable is asserting ‘it must be all the info or nothing.’” Perhaps you are advocating an “all or nothing” position here: there is either one uber-solution to finding nutritional information, or all the other methods in the world are worthless? Honestly, I don’t know what your objection is.
I’ve written a bit more, but mostly I’ve just been staring at your post for some time, and I have no idea what your position is on reasonable difficulty or effort. Can we place any expectations on adults at all? At what point would you say “Look, dude, I’m trying to help you, but you’ve got to meet me part way”?
For example, suppose we put calorie content on the menu. This is just a number, it has no intrinsic meaning, so it must be placed in context. To make any use of this number at all, they must know something about nutrition. Is it reasonable to expect adults to know something, even a single fact, about proper nutrition? Do me a favor: answer this question before you continue reading.
Suppose you know only one fact about nutrition. There are probably pretty good odds that your fact is the approximate number of calories you should eat in a day, 2000 (a number that appers on every nutrition label I’ve ever seen). If you look at the pdf I linked to, one previous study “found that labeling was effective in altering food consumed, but only when coupled with information indicating that 2,000 was the recommended daily allowance of calories.” That is, people don’t even seem to be aware of this one fact.
What do you make of this? Does this say that the “amount of effort and planning and inconvenience it takes to” interpret nutritional information is too great, and the government ought to intervene? Can we still say that consumers are making an informed decision if a third party both provides the information and interprets it for you?
That’s a lot of questions, so do with them as you please. Answer them one-by-one, or some subset of them, or maybe a general response to all of them. Whatever you think gets your opinion across the best.
Yes. Of course. It’s reasonable to expect adults to know a little about a lot of subjects. We expect them to know how to read, even if it’s only the very basic English found on road and business signs. We expect them to know how to perform mathematical calculations, even if it’s only addition and subtraction. We expect them to know about biology, even if it’s only that losing the red sticky stuff is a bad thing. We expect them to know about history, even if it’s only that America won its independence from Britain some time in the past.
Why wouldn’t it be reasonable to expect them to know about nutrition, even if it’s only that most people should eat about 2000 calories a day? But I suppose there’s that tricky math again. Heck, they don’t even need to know that much. They just need to know that when comparing two items, the lower calorie value is usually going to be better.
“People are in general too dumb to understand, so why try?” is not a terribly compelling argument.