Try ordering a medium (中等份量的) coffee at most coffee houses. They look at you as though you are out of your mind.
The word medium, especially in food and drinks, is going the way of the "cup". In fact, drink sizes have become a free-for-all of advertising, separated (分离) from any real description of size. The move away from medium is partly caused by economics - companies are trying to get a little more money by saying a size is bigger than it really is. To be sure, medium hasn't died altogether. We still have medium bags and medium olives (橄榄). There are still medium eggs: they are often the smallest. Bigger eggs are called large, extra-large (特大的), and jumbo (巨大的) size.
Small products are doing very well, but they aren't called small. For example, breakfast food, some medicines, and bathing products are sold in very small packages (包). But they're never called small, says Lorna Opatow (洛娜·欧帕托), president of the marketing research firm of Opatow Associates (欧帕托联合会). "They're called individual (独特的) size, or one time use, or disposable (可自由处理的)."
When it comes to sizing, the best companies are fast-food restaurants. At McDonald's the drink sizes are regular, medium, large and, sometimes, extra-large. "Nobody wants a small drink these days," says McDonald's Chuck Ebeling (查克·埃贝林). "We live in a time when people bring along a big bottle of water as though it were nothing. Everything has to be big."
At Burger King (汉堡王) fast-food restaurants there are still small, medium and large drinks. But what do those words mean? In l954, when the company started, it called a 12-ounce (盎司) regular and a l6-ounce large. Today the small is l6 ounces and the large is 32 ounces.
The king of big sizes is 7-Eleven, which says that it makes America's biggest drink, the 64-ounce Double Gulp (双料饮料). Karen Raskopf (卡伦·拉斯克普夫), speaking for 7-Eleven, says no other country drinks as much as America does: the chain's international stores don't sell the Double Gulp. Indeed, in Europe (欧洲) and Japan a small size often means that something is better - the 6 1/2-ounce bottle of Perrier water (薄荷水), for example.
The cause of the increase in size of drinks is a simple fact: the actual cost of adding more water to a drink is a very small part of the price. "The packaging and production costs for a drink are most of the cost," says Ebeling of McDonald's. "If we package it in a larger size, the cost of the drink doesn't increase much, and we can charge a higher price."
Surprisingly, Pasqua Coffee (帕斯卡咖啡), a restaurant company based in San Francisco (旧金山), is staying with small, medium and large sizes. "We want to serve our customers quickly," says a manager of the company. "We don't want to waste time correcting customers' use of words."
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background information:
1. Burger King: The web site for this restaurant is http://www.burgerking.com .
2. Europe: You can refer to the web site http://www.searcheurope.com for more information.
3. San Francisco: Please visit http://www.ci.sf.ca.us for more information.