If »Free Refill« Goes Under, the Nation Goes Under

Let me venture a thesis: you can measure the worth and condition of a society by whether fast-food restaurants sell drinks only in measured portions or as free refill.

Should the word worth in this thesis sound too sharp to you, I want to sharpen it further, to continued existence, at least in the case where a switch has been made from free refill to, say, single-use coupons.

Let me explain!

Picture yourself as a guest at your favorite burger-flipper, be it the one with the Golden Arches or the one with the Golden Crowns. You pay and receive your meat roll and your fried potato sticks. And so it doesn’t go down too dry, there’s a soda to go with it, from Coca Cola or from Is Pepsi okay?, to wash it down, so the throat doesn’t go dry.

Should you belong to those rooted in their homeland and therefore enviable people who know only one fast-food restaurant, then you may not know: in some restaurants you get exactly the amount of soda you ordered and paid for. In other restaurants you get a paper cup and can help yourself freely at a soda fountain. Whether you order cola, orange or lemon soda, whether iced tea or sometimes even a sports drink, you can mix freely and, above all, refill as often as you like.

Normal and self-evident

The principle of free refill (in German: freies Nachfüllen) strikes some people as normal and self-evident, and others as surreal and fairy-tale-like.

Of course every customer gets only the amount of soda he paid for, say the ones who don’t know free refill.

But the others know: a restaurant can also offer people as much to drink as they care to drink, and let them refill as often as they like.

Free refill does in fact presuppose a reliably honored social contract.

Free refill presupposes that every person really draws only as much soda as he will realistically drink. That he draws it decently and cleanly. And that he has at least paid for his paper cup beforehand.

A third group

Ah yes, there is a third group of people: those of us who know free refill, yet are watching in these years as fast-food restaurants replace the free fountains, one after another, with unfree ones. It is the group I belong to, and it makes me rather wistful.

Only recently I had to watch a burger-flipper replace the free soda fountain with one operated by QR codes. The paper cup has a QR code printed on it, and when it is scanned, exactly one cup’s worth comes out of the machine.

It seems to me that this is a worldwide phenomenon, and by »worldwide« I mean: right across the once-free West; fast-food restaurants are giving up free refill.

As their reason they state, somewhat vaguely, »changed consumption habits among our customers«.

These are possibly changes similar to the ones that have led, in US supermarkets especially, to more and more product categories having to be secured behind locks, often the last phase before the supermarket or the large drugstore closes its branches in a neighborhood (foxbusiness.com, 21 May 2024).

We can guess

The restaurants don’t say explicitly what kind of change it is that moves them to discontinue, in some neighborhoods, a free refill that customers actually like. But we can guess, from experience of the world. And from this we can also guess why lethocracies such as Brussels and London want to censor social media: so that the victims don’t compare notes with one another and possibly establish, as a group, that the »changed consumption habits« have something in common.

No, the restaurants don’t say what moved them, but I do want to say what moves me about this. I am wistful. In sad nostalgia I sense that something here is breaking, indeed, for the foreseeable future, has broken.

Once upon a time

Once upon a time, so the new fairy tales go, there was a land of milk and honey, where you paid only once for the soda, and then drank as much as you liked? Those were the days when you could play in the park without fear and celebrate in the streets and even go to school, just like that!

»What a wonderful country that was«, the children will ask, »and why did we leave it?«

»Oh, I have said too much!«, we will say to silence ourselves, and then we will whisper urgently: »Forget it and don’t ask about it. Certainly not at school, certainly not as a joke! Otherwise the uniformed men of the Unsere-Demokratie police will come round for a house search, and then we’ll have to clean up first and buy all our expensive things again.«