Ten Psychological Tricks Fast Food Restaurants Use to Make You Buy More

Fast food restaurants use some tricks to get you to buy more, and you are not even aware of it.

According to Business Insider, here are ten ways fast food restaurants trick you into buying more.

1. They use red on everything.  Scientists think the color red stimulates your appetite when you see it.  Orange, yellow, and pink work too.
2. They always smell good.  What you smell has a huge impact on your appetite.  That's why you start smelling Cinnabon in the mall about a hundred yards before you get to the food court.
3. Food porn.  Like the picture above, they get you with those big close-ups of that perfectly-cooked, perfectly-built burger that doesn't exist in any actual fast food joint.  By the time you get the nasty burger from the drive-thru, you are too hungry to notice the difference.  But some fast food places will build that perfect burger like in their pictures, but only if you ask for it that way.
4. Blasting top 40 music.  Relaxing music like classical and jazz tends to keep people in a restaurant longer, according to one study.  So fast food chains use loud, fast pop music to make you eat faster and leave earlier.  They need the turnover.
5. Meal deals.  The restaurant gets less for a combo than it would for each item bought separately.  But the deal you get makes you buy more food than you would buy otherwise.
6. Bright lighting.  It keeps you from relaxing, so you'll spend less time there.
7. Keeping menu options limited.  The game is to give a good selection without overwhelming customers with too many options.  They aim for about six items per menu category.
8. Appealing names and descriptions.  There are certain adjectives they always go back to.  Coffee is always "aromatic" or beef is always "sizzling," you get the picture.
9. Different sizes for the same item.  Restaurants make more profit on smaller sizes.  So they actually make the large sizes absurdly large on purpose, to make people order more of the small sizes.
10. Special menu designs.  They put the expensive items in the upper right corner, where your eye tends to land first.  Or they highlight certain items by making them bigger than the rest, or putting a box around them.

So now you know, but you will forget and fall into the trap again and again, so eat on proudly.