How Much Hot Sauce Is "No Hot Sauce"?
Jan 16th, 2007 by Greg Bulmash
It's a common complaint, over-saucing at Taco Bell.
I'm not talking about how much sauce they put on their food, but instead, how many hot sauce packets they give you with it. In my last two visits to Taco Bell, I got 18 and 12 hot sauce packets respectively.
On the day I got 18, I asked for sauce. Of course I asked for their "fire" sauce, and only three packets were at that heat level. The others ranged from "mild" to "hot". So, when I asked for their hottest hot sauce, I got three packets of it and 15 waste packets.
On the day I got 12 packets, I specifically said "no hot sauce, please". They asked if I wanted hot sauce, and I said "no hot sauce, please." Let me repeat that once more. I said "no hot sauce, please". I took Spanish classes in grade school, junior high, high school and college (I lived in California), and though I'm a little rusty in it now, I'm fairly sure that "no hot sauce, please" does not mean "please give me 12 packets of 'mild' sauce" in Spanish.
And as rusty as my Spanish is, I do know that "no" means the same thing in both languages. My 7th Grade Spanish teacher, Mr. Benezra, said you had to wave your index finger side to side to emphasize it, but how do you do that at a drive-thru?
They don't even have a keying system in the register to denote whether or not you want sauce, much less what kind. Therefore, at my local Taco Bell, they usually ask you at the drive-thru speaker if you'd like hot sauce. Then when you get to the window, they ask you again, because apparently working at Taco Bell contributes to short-term memory loss.
I asked one of the drive-thru people why they asked twice, and she told me there was no way to enter it in at the register and they usually forgot your answer by the time you got to the window, so they asked again. So I asked why they didn't wait until you got to the window rather than ask you for information they couldn't record and wouldn't remember. The answer: that's what management tells them to do.
The problem is so prevalent, that in late 2006, a guy returned 25,000 packets in 6 giant trash bags. With the aid of some friends, the gentleman lugged the 25,000 packets into a local Taco Bell and left them with a note, claiming he'd been accumulating them in the trunk of his car for 3 years. A side note with some of the news reports on the matter said that Taco Bell hands out nearly 6 billion packets a year.
Think about that. In a year, they hand out nearly one packet for every man, woman, and child on the planet. But their oversaucing has led to other merriment, aside from massive packet returns. There's a great page that compares the ability of various hot sauces to clean tarnished pennies.
But since pennies seem to be about as popular as hot sauce packets with many consumers... moot point. Though if they could create a machine that did for hot sauce packets what Coinstar did for pennies, that might be a very useful thing.
I stopped eating at Taco Bell, just before the recent E.coli debacle. Take a look at the nutritional value (ha!) of their foods. Mmmmmm, trans fat. Humans were simply not engineered to consume trans fat. And just one meal at Taco Bell can put you at the limit for daily intake of saturated fat. Alas, Mexican food can be quite healthy for you if it's prepared properly ...
As far as the sauces go, well ... I agree, the hotter the better.
Famous Daves sauce packets are far better for emergency purposes ... ah, but why are there so few packets of Devil Spit in our emergency sauce bucket? Because we actually use the stuff (unlike the excess Taco Bell packets that are still hanging around after *years* of dietary abuse) ...
Where I live, we have the exact opposite problem. In fact, I generally go into the Taco Bells to order since they are likely to give me ZERO hot sauce packets in the drive through if I don't go inside and get them myself.
Recently, our Taco Bells have removed the hot sauce stands from inside the store and they only hand them out if you ask for them. When I asked for six packets of fire sauce on my last order, for three tacos and a burritto supreme, I was told, "We try to limit them to three per order." I explained that if I were to order 200 tacos for my staff, that would equate to slightly less than 1/2 a drop of sauce per taco. She just stared at me dumped a handful of packets into my bag.
Huh, apparently, vinegar + salt is the cleaning agent in hot sauce. good to know!
Man is it refreshing to know others are suffering the same fate as I. I had no idea this was an epidemic. I generally get 15-30 sauce packets per trip. I don't mind so much, because I save them and have like 50 gallons worth of almost texas pete wannabe. That is good enough for me.