The Ulterior Motive Behind Free Drinking Straws

Have you ever considered the reason restaurants supply a straw with every drink, when serving soda, ice tea, or other non-alcoholic beverages?

"Customers expect them," you might say. And you'd be right. Customers do expect them at McDonalds or Starbucks. But those same people don't expect them at home. In fact, most of the people who drink through straws in restaurants do not use them at home.

Restaurant customers have been trained to ask for and expect straws. That's a more accurate explanation. How did it happen? Marketing, and repetition. Straws have been in common use so long that most of us have grown up with them. Straw at the restaurant, plain glassware at home has become the ordinary way of thinking for many of us.

What's the result? We drink more in restaurants. That's why they do it.

For the entire history of human evolution, splashing a drink on your face or at least your lips was an accepted and normal part of drinking. The introduction of straws changed the rules. Over tens of thousands of years, our bodies evolved to associate wet lips with satisfied thirst. Drinks that are ingested via straw don't touch out lips, and so do not satisfy our thirst as quickly. The result: we drink more.

Nowhere in the many articles chronicling the history of drinking straws have I read this simple truth. Do they teach it at McDonalds and Wendy's franchise school? I wonder.

Try it yourself next time you order a Coke or ice tea . . . skip the straw. Do you drink less? I wager you will.

It's an intersting point to ponder.

And how exactly does the lack of a straw reduce consumption? I'm not sure, but I have some ideas. One is this: you don't feel the need to take a drink while your lips are still wet from the previous sip. The straw gets around this inhibition, because your lips never get wet from the drink.

An interesting fact that reinforces this theory of mine relates to the carrying capacity of modern straws. Did you know that the plastic straws at today's fast food restaurants are 50% larger than the straws at soda fountains 50 years ago? It's true. Look at some old straws in a museum if you don't believe me. Stimulation of consumption is the only reason I can see for increasing the diameter of a straw.

As a child, I never once heard the complaint, This straw is no good! I can't suck enough juice through it!" Did you?

But the marketers were watching. If they could cause a drink to be ingested more rapidly, they reasoned, they'd be more likely to sell refills. And they were right. It worked. The high capacity drinking straw was a solution in search of a problem, and it's been a huge success for the foodservice industry. But has it helped us, the eaters?

There has been much made recently of the supersizing of American food. The high capacity plastic drinking straw has made a major contribution to the success of supersized drinks, alongside our supersized meals. High capacity eating and drinking have grown up together in America.

There are some drinks that are served with toppings - the head on beer, the whipped cream on hot chocolate - and the topping is savored on your lips and in your mouth. It's a part of the experience of drinking those liquids. And as a result, liquids like that are seldom drunk with straws, even today.