If you ever find yourself craving wings in Philadelphia, you may want to bring a calculator along.
theres gotta be a better way to convey this information
This is a real menu from Danny's Wok, a Chinese restaurant in West Philly.
Whatever is going on in the pricing structure for their wings is a mystery that has captured the imagination of thousands of wing aficionados and Twitter users.
Sean Woodall, the 24-year-old Philly resident who tweeted an image of the menu, said she has "no idea why the prices are so nonsensical" and didn't ask.
The price per wing (which will henceforth be known as PPW) has left a lot of people baffled, and it soon went viral on Twitter. What is the pattern???
@seanposting @AsnoDeBuridan can I just say that I'm deeply disturbed by 30 35 40 45 50 60 70 SEVENTY FIVE 80 90 100 like...stick to a pattern FOR CHRIST'S SAKE
@seanposting @tesselode 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.
Fortunately, people are figuring out all the ways to ~hack the menu~ and get those big savings.
@seanposting @JamesRambin Purchasing 200 wings instead of 4 brings the per-unit cost down by less than two full cents.
@seanposting If you want 200 wings you can save 5 cents by buying 150+50 separately.
@seanposting get 24 chicken wings instead of 4 and save.... five cents per wing??? get 80 wings instead of 4 and save.... $1.90!
And then Math Twitter got involved. They literally wrote formulas breaking down the PPW.
@seanposting this formula breaks down at the 24 wing mark, and I can't figure out what on earth went wrong at that point https://t.co/lCmDu7j13b
@seanposting 4 Chicken wings (4.55+n) where n is an additional chicken wing and n=$1.15 two out of every third time where n=$1.10
(I'm bad at math and cannot summarize the formulas for you. Please don't yell at me in the comments. I still use my phone to calculate tips.)
Spreadsheets!
@seanposting 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. https://t.co/Se7RrypOym
Graphs!
@seanposting
@seanposting I'm not seeing the pattern but there's an awesome minimization problem in here somewhere to get the best price for N wings. https://t.co/l4F61VAJin
BuzzFeed News asked an employee of Danny's Wok what the deal is with the pricing structure, and he didn't know. A manager at the restaurant could not immediately be reached.
As for Woodall, she theorizes that maybe "they 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," she added. "Maybe it's a mystery better left unsolved."
@alexmillar just buy 150 + 45 + 6 wings