I'm gonna have to charge you for that extra sauce.

Now, I am not a very difficult consumer. There aren't a lot of things I demand when I walk into any retail or food service establishment. I mean, I know what it's like to deal with difficult customers and get paid crap wages. Just treat me fairly with at least basic customer service and I'm usually pretty satisfied.

But there is one thing that really pisses me off. The situation:

It's lunch or dinner time. My stomach knows this, and tells me I am hungry. But I am not hungry for just any food, no. This time, I have that certain hunger that can only be satisfied by a 20 piece set of McDonald's Chicken McNuggets. Yea you know the ones - those golden, artificial tasting, fat-injected, pressed chicken meat McNuggets. Now, I don't really go to McDonald's that much anymore because it usually is a pretty horrible experience, but this is the one situation where I will make the exception. After all they have a McNugget monopoly.

So I walk into my local McDonald's, really excited about how I'm gonna order a bunch of mcnuggets and really scarf them down. I walk up to the counter and place my order chicken nuggets with some barbeque and sweet and sour sauce. I step back for others to order. I nod and say to myself, "damn, these nuggets are going to be fuckin awesome."

And then they give me my order. There are the chicken nuggets, and there are the sauces. Two of them. WTF? Now, being an experienced chicken nugget eater, I know those two sauces aren't going to last. I have determined that, given the nugget surface area and the viscosity of McDonald's sauces, the optimal nugget to sauce ratio is about 3.5:1. That means that for total coverage, they should give AT LEAST 3 sauces per 10 nugget order.

So I go, "could I have another sauce please?"

Instead of instantly responding and setting another on my tray, the girl gets that look on her face. You know, THAT look. A look I have come to know too well. And I know what's coming next.

"I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to charge you for an extra sauce."

I try to stay composed, and go "okay that's fine." I reacch into my pocket for change. Inside, however, my excitment about the nuggets has disappeared. In has been replaced by a burning rage, and in my mind I am cursing the McDonald's corporation with every part of my soul. I take my tray and sit down, my happy day destroyed by this encounter.

Now, I'm not cheap. Ten cents for an extra sauce? Fine - 10 cents is nothing to me. But its the principle of the thing. I mean, are there margins *that* thin that they cannot throw an extra sauce my way every now and then? It's just one of those annoyances that really drag down the experience. Are they willing to risk lose customer relationship and all of the future income it means, for a DIME?! I'm not sure if this is something franchisee-specific - I wonder what corporate thinks. But one thing I do know is that pissing customers off for an extra 10 cents is NOT good customer relationship management and it is not good business.

And nugget sauce isn't like ketchup - an extra condiment you add on. Sauce is a part of the nugget experience - you cannot have nuggets without the sauce. I have never seen someone order just mcnuggets by themselves. The nuggets, pretty bland by themselves, take a lot of their flavor from the sauce - once you get to the bottom of that little white tub, it's over.

Now, McDonald's doesn't get that many chances from me. They are already on the edge because of the many other crappy experiences I have had from them in the past. I don't think this is very different from the general public either - I know people that refuse to walk into a McDonald's. That means that each encounter is that much more important to them because they have that much more to lose. FFS shape up McDonald's.