The middle ground

I've talked about this before, elsewhere, if not here. Since I was a kid something strange has happened to sizes. For example, it used to be that bread came in thin sliced, medium sliced and thick sliced; tins of processed food in small, medium and large; ice creams in small cones or large cones. Now the bread is medium or thick and the tins and cones medium or large. Small seems to have vanished off the radar.
I have two alternate theories to explain this. One is the theory, based on far more evidence than this, that the people of the world are gradually turning into morons who do not realise that to have a medium you have to have something larger AND something smaller. They genuinely see "medium" as being the opposite of "large". In my gloomier moods this is the theory that I embrace. In my happier moods I have an alternate theory which is that it's a product of misplaced psychobabble advertising spin. People are more likely, so the theory goes, to buy something that is labelled "medium" than something labelled "small" even though it costs more and is exactly the same size. I say misplaced because if this is the thinking involved then there's a startling gap of logic. Offered a choice of small and large, the average greedy customer will, perhaps, for those psychological reasons, choose "large". But hang on, if "medium" is preferable to "small" doesn't that mean that if the choice is shifted to medium/large a bigger proportion of customers will choose the medium than would have ever chosen the small thus reducing rather than increasing those turning to the more profitable large?

All this is old ground. What's new though is the choice I was confronted with when I went to buy a kebab at my local fish,chips and kebabs shop tonight. Looking down the list headed "Kebabs" I saw that I could buy

Donner Kebab
Chicken Kebab
Mixed Meat Kebab
Kebab Meat and Chips in a tray
Chicken Kebab Meat and chips in a tray
Mixed Meat and chips in a tray

All of these came in two sizes - medium or large, usually with a price difference of about 70 pence. It was the next three items on the list that puzzled me.

Small Kebab Meat and Chips
Small Chicken Kebab Meat and Chips
Small Mixed Meat and Chips

And these confused me because all of these also come in two sizes - medium and large. Was, I pondered, a large small Kebab Meat and Chips bigger or smaller than a medium, regular Kebab Meat and Chips?
The prices indicated that they were in fact the same and that a medium small was smaller than a medium regular.

I'm no wiser now. Because the whole thing was making my head hurt, I bought a steak and kidney pie.