Textual Pornography

I had dinner Tuesday night at Turoni’s Pizzery & Brewery, a local pizza place a few blocks from campus. While browsing the menu, I noticed something odd about the dessert prices.

The list of twelve desserts is at the bottom of the menu linked above, but there are really only two, cookies or brownies, available with or without nuts and in increments of one, six, or twelve. Here is a table listing the difference between the nutted and nutless versions of the six dessert/quantity combinations:

How arbitrary are these prices? Apparently, the nuts on six cookies cost more than six times the nuts on one cookie (more on this later). But doubling that amount of nuts costs only five cents extra. The brownie price increases are in reverse order; the jump from one brownie to six costs merely an extra cent, but doubling the brownies from six to twelve more than triples the price of the nuts.

Clearly the only logical explanation is that the number of nuts varies wildly depending on the number of dessert items that you get.

You may have noticed another aberration in the pricing, but if not, inspect the column labeled “half dozen.” In the other two price columns, the cost of nuts in the brownies exceeds that of the cookies; I can believe that the brownies would have more nuts than the cookies, so I’ll buy this. However, the inequality flips when you have six of each dessert. There is a rather odd explanation for this, which I will summarize in a second table:

Apparently it’s cheaper to buy six individual cookies than a half-dozen group of cookies.