Threadlines: How much should 55 Burgers, 55 Fries, 55 Tacos, 55 Pies, 55 Cokes, 100 Tater Tots, 100 Pizzas, 100 Tenders, 100 Meatballs, 100 Coffees, 55 Wings, 55 Shakes, 55 Pancakes, 55 Pastas, 55 Peppers, and 155 Taters really cost?

Tim Robinson's I Think You Should Leave is a sketch comedy series that features irreverent and offbeat humor that has led to a cult fanbase that knows episodes and quotes from the show by heart. Ben Travers from IndieWire describes it well, writing that, “I Think You Should Leave offers a language all its own, and if you speak Tim Robinson, you might as well sing it"

Season 3 of the fan-favorite series dropped a few weeks ago and features much of the same unpredictable and absurd moments as seasons prior.

One specific sketch features a man - Tim Robinson - who orders in the drive-through and has the bright idea to start a pay-it-forward chain. As he pays for the person behind him he quips... "who knows? maybe it'll catch on."

He then guns it, speeds around the restaurant, re-enters the drive-through, and begins screaming his ridiculous order into the intercom, "55 Burgers, 55 Fries, 55 Tacos, 55 Pies, 55 Cokes, 100 Tater Tots, 100 Pizzas, 100 Tenders, 100 Meatballs, 100 Coffees, 55 Wings, 55 Shakes, 55 Pancakes, 55 Pastas, 55 Peppers, and 155 Taters!"

Impressively, the drive-through attendant keeps track of each item on the screen as he orders, and it totals up to $680.00 when he is done ordering.

Sadly for Tim's character, his pay-it-forward chain doesn't end up working out, as the driver in front of him refuses to pay for his massive order, and some standard I Think You Should Leave chaos ensues. The sketch is, as most of Robinson's scenes are, unexpected, hilarious, and absurd.

One item of the scene seems particularly absurd: how did this man order 1,000 menu items for just $680? Whether or not the man in front of him paid for it, this order seems like a truly unbelievable value.

A quick scroll through YouTube comments finds other viewers who are equally baffled by the value of this order:

This article is going to go in-depth into this mammoth order, analyze each of the items that were ordered, compare it to market prices, and ultimately arrive at a final answer to the question of "Did this man almost make the best deal in fast food history?"

Let's find out.

Baseline

The simplest way to break this order down is to calculate the average total of each item Tim's character orders. As he screams into the intercom, he orders exactly 1,205 items. At an order total of $680, this puts each item at an average price of $0.56.

Even the valuest of value menus don't feature items priced that low.
But we can take this analysis a little further.

Item-by-item

I found a price analog for each of the items that Tim's character orders. The items fell into 3 categories.
First, items that have a price listed on the menu that we can see in the skit. Second, items that have a clear analog from other fast food restaurants can be used to get a comparison price.
Finally, items that have a price that is more difficult to pin down.

Category 1: Prices on the menu

Starting in the first category of items, the menu we can see in the show lists two items that Tim orders - burgers and tenders.

The hamburger is listed at $3.25. Note that there are different prices listed for the cheeseburger and double or triple-stack burgers, but given that Tim's character says "burgers" and the order screen lists "hamburgers", it seems fair to go with the assumption of using the hamburger price of $3.25 an item.

An order of tenders is listed at $4.75.

Adding just these two items together, we are at $653.75 for just the burgers and tenders. Starting to get the feeling that we are going to blow past the $680 threshold quickly.

Category 2: Prices sourced from other restaurants

The second category of items is those that are not visible on the in-show menu, so I looked to other fast food restaurants to determine the accurate price to use in the calculations.¹

Here's where the model gets slightly more complex. When researching possible analogs for fast food items, it was hard to pick which price to go with. Do I go with the cheapest item I can find and help cut costs a bit? Do I try to calculate an industry-wide average? Do I just use McDonald's prices for everything?

So, to build a bit of variance to the model, I decided to create three scenarios: a low, base, and high pricing scenario.
The low-price scenario will feature the lowest price I can find - the small size, value item, etc.
The base price uses a middle-of-the-road price - I tried to use an average wherever possible or use an average fast food menu price.
Finally, the high price scenario is exactly how it sounds - not using fine dining prices or anything like that, but simply more of a splurge price, something like a nicer taco, or a large Coke.
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Most of the items in the order fall into this category: fries, tacos, pies, sodas, tater tots, pizzas, coffees, shakes, pastas, peppers, and taters.

Fries

When Tim's character orders 55 fries, the order screen takes this down as 55 medium fries. However, from the menu visible in the show, we can only see the prices for small or large fries, $1.75 or $3.50, respectively. What I decided to do here is set the average of those two numbers (~$2.63) to be the base option. For the low, I pulled the medium fries price from McDonald's ($1.79) and for the high, I used the Chick-fil-A medium fries ($2.65)

Tacos

For tacos, I used the 2 tacos for $1 deal from Jack In The Box as the cheapest option, the Taco Bell crunchy taco for the base, and a chicken taco from my local taco truck as the premium option.

Pies

Moving to the 55 pies, the low price is the Mcdonald's apple pie, the high price is the Popeye's Cinnamon Apple pie, and the base is the average of the two options.

Cokes

The order of Cokes was pretty simple - the cheapest soda on the market is the McDonald's soft drink, at $1.00 even, the base option is the Chick-Fil-A medium drink at $2.39, and the premium option is the Burger King large Coke at a whopping ^(hehe) $3.49.

Tater Tots

I had a bit of a hard time finding a range of tater tot options on fast food menus, so I just used the Sonic small, medium, and large for each of their respective scenarios - $1.19, $1.99, and $2.39.

Pizzas

Pizzas were a little bit of a tricky one as Tim's character doesn't do any sort of specifying the size or toppings on the pizza.
So, I assumed he was referring to personal pizzas with 1 topping for the low price, 2 toppings for the base scenario, and then did a small, 1-topping pizza for the high price. All of these from Pizza Hut as they were the pizza chain I found with personal pizzas.

Coffees

For the coffees, it was similar to the Cokes in that I just took the cheapest, middle-of-the-road, and most expensive black coffees I could find from fast food restaurants. This yielded $1.00 for McDonald’s coffee, $1.59 for Jack In The Box, and $2.25 for Chick-Fil-A's coffee.

Shakes

On to the milkshakes. From the low-scenario Sonic mini shake at $1.99, to the middle-of-the-road Chick-Fil-A milkshake at $3.25, to the premium option at Five Guys at $6.71, there is a pretty big variance in prices in the milkshake category.

Pastas

For the 55 pastas, the only fast food restaurant I could reasonably find pasta at was Fazoli's. For a side pasta, it'll run you $5.99, which I used for the low-price scenario, the base option is plain spaghetti at $8.99, and the high price is Fazoli's spaghetti with meatballs at $10.99.

Peppers

Peppers was difficult to track down.
Was Tim's character ordering stuffed peppers? Jalapeno poppers? Something else entirely?
With many of these pepper or pepper-adjacent items not existing at fast food restaurants, I ultimately decided to assume he wanted a side of peppers from the Chicago-based chain, Portillo's. This side of peppers costs a mere 75 cents.

Taters

The final item in this category is the 155 taters. I assumed he was ordering baked potatoes here, as the tater tot and french fry versions of potatoes were already covered earlier in his order. And if we know one thing about this guy, he wouldn't be one to order inefficiently.
For the low price, Wendy's offers a baked potato at $2.89, and Arby's has one on their menu for $5.80 which I used for the high price point. For the base, I took the average of those, at $4.35.

Category 3: Uncertain quantities

Onto the final category, in which the quantity of Tim’s order is uncertain.
For example, when he orders 55 pancakes, is he referring to 55 individual pancakes? Or does he mean 55 orders of pancakes? The attendant does not provide any clarity here as the order screen just lists "55 pancakes."

To address this, I decided to split it into three scenarios again.

The low-price scenario is going to assume that Tim's character is ordering individual items, meaning that I will take the closest analog I can find and divide that by the number of items to determine the individual item price.
For example, for pancakes, take an order of 3 pancakes and divide by 3. From there, the base-price and high-price scenarios are going to be treated very similarly, using either the standard or premium option, respectively, to determine those prices.

The cheapest pancakes in the fast food market are the McDonald's hotcakes, which come in at $2.49 for an order of 3. Divide that by 3 and we get a price for an individual pancake to be $0.83. On the high price, an order of a pancake stack from IHOP is $7.99.

Moving to the order of 100 meatballs, I found meatballs on two menus - Fazoli's and Olive Garden² .
The Fazoli's item came at a much cheaper price point, at $5.49 for an order of 5, while the Olive Garden meatballs cost $11.29.
So, I took the Fazoli's meatballs individually for the low-price scenario - again, assuming Tim's character wanted 100 meatballs individually, not orders of meatballs - the full order price for the base scenario, and the Olive Garden meatballs for the high-price scenario.

Finally, for the orders of wings, I assumed a Wingstop 6-piece for the base scenario, a Wingstop 10-piece for the high-price scenario, and took the 6-piece divided out individually for the low-price.

With all of that parsed out, we can finally arrive at some estimated price totals for this gargantuan order.

Assuming all the lowest possible prices for these items, Tim's character ordered $3,276.14 of food.

Working off a middle-of-the-road price point, the order total comes out to be $5,037.50.

And finally, if Tim's character was ordering at a fast food restaurant that was a higher price, the order would have set him back $7,042.75.

Clearly, all of these totals come out to be a massive jump from the $680.00 he is charged in the show.
Even in the lowest-price scenario, Tim's character is given a massive ~79.4% discount off the correct order total.

This begs the question... how?
Well, it's unclear.

There is nothing in the show to indicate any sort of lunch special or buy-one-get-one deals. There is also no reason to believe he was getting bulk discounts. Maybe the attendant really liked the man and gave him some personal discounts, maybe this particular restaurant just has insanely low prices for some reason.

Whatever the case, it's clear that this pay-it-forward order should have cost much more than $680. At a minimum, the $680 quoted price was a ~80% discount from what the price should have been.

Without a doubt, this order - had it worked out - would have been the best deal in fast-food history, and would have ranked alongside the Louisiana Purchase, Tom Brady getting drafted in the 6th round, and Google acquiring YouTube as one of the best deals of all time.

¹ Note that the prices I used are based on my local fast-food locations, and might change based on restaurants near you

² Yes, Olive Garden is not really fast-food, but we are rolling with it