NPR did an analysis and demonstrated that buying the largest size pizza is almost always a better deal than the smaller sizes. This piqued my interest, since movie marathon food should always include pizza as its cornerstone, but I have never before bought the largest possible pizzas.
So I thought I’d do an analysis and see what I would save. Let’s use the prices and sizes of my local pizza place as an example. The large, 14 inch (the size I always order), cheese pizza costs $11.85. The extra-large, 18 inch, cheese pizza costs $14.55.
I’d have to order 1.7 large pizzas to get the same amount of food as one extra-large pizza. If I could somehow order 1.7 large pizzas, it would cost me $20.15. That means I save $5.60 every time I buy an extra-large compared to the equivalent amount of large pizzas.
That adds up for a 24 hour movie marathon! At my last two marathons, I ordered six large pizzas. Let’s assume I paid at least $71.10 for those pizzas. I could have ordered 4 extra-large pizzas for $58.20 instead. That would have me saved $12.90 on my bill, and I would have had the equivalent of 6.8 large pizzas. In other words – I could have been getting almost one more pizza’s worth of food for $13 less!
In the past, I’ve ordered large pizzas for two reasons:
- It let me to easily order a variety of pizzas with different toppings
- It gave me an easy point-of-reference, since I usually order large pizzas, and I had a good idea of how many large pizza slices people would eat.
For the future, I think I’m going extra-large for some great savings!
Notes:
- There was one counter-point to the original NPR story – don’t buy that much pizza if it’ll go to waste. Point taken.
