A Chinese restaurant’s menu for chicken wings is now going viral for its complicated pricing structure, and people are really bringing out their math games to break down the numbers.
While the menu card looked like any other ordinary one from different food places, the pricing structure has left many netizens baffled, including the person who took the picture, Sean Woodall, a 24-year-old resident of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
I’m confused about why some individual chicken wings cost $1.10 & others cost $1.15.
While speaking to BuzzFeed, Woodall said that she has “no idea why the prices are so nonsensical” and that she didn’t bother to ask the West Philly restaurant, Danny’s Wok, about their wings.
Seems like many people were really bothered by the pricing structure suddenly going off the rail and not following a clear pattern after a certain amount of wings.
Up until 24 wings there’s a pattern, but it goes off the rails on the second column. I would say someone made a mistake, but who am I to question a masterpiece such as this.
Lucky for them, however, math Twitter was there for the rescue. And surprisingly, a lot of people swooped in to break down the numbers in the menu – some even creating formulas and graphs.
Here’s a spreadsheet where I extrapolated the prices of 1-3 wings, then tracked the difference by subtracting the price of the last multiple of 25 (in column C). You can see the deviation when it hits 75 compared to 50, then continue tracking the deviations as I laid them out. pic.twitter.com/Se7RrypOym
If you want less than 25 wings, the best option is to get a multiple of three. For 25 or more, 25, 50 and 125 have the same, lowest, price per wing. pic.twitter.com/u6VCF1D6IW
The publication reached out to an employee of Danny’s Wok for answers regarding the mysterious pricing structure of their wings, but even the employee had no idea. Woodall, however, theorized that the restaurant “wanted to make it as easy as possible for customers to know how much they would pay for any possible amount of wings, without the cashier needing to clarify or calculate.”
“Still no idea as to why the 25th wing is $0.55. Maybe it’s a mystery better left unsolved,” she told BuzzFeed.
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