Downsizing?

So after over thirty years of being in business and calling a 16" a large, there is discussion on downsizing the large to a 14" so it meets industry standards. Personally, I think it’s a bad idea. For one thing I don’t want to have to retrain customers on their expectations and it’s always been a point of pride to offer a 16" as a large when it seems everybody else is offering a 14" .
Is there anyone else here who also offers a 16" as a large and has no plans to downsize? I would like to hear your reasons.

I’ve alway had a small (10"), large (14") and Giant (16"). After thirty years, everyone else in town was calling their sizes: small (10"), medium (14") and Large (16"), after fighting the confusion for ten years, I gave up and scrawled “Medium” across the 'Large" pan, in an obvious after-fact-manner, now we know that if someone orders a “large”, he is wrong! As we no longer have a “large” size. So we can clarify whether he is talking about our “medium” or our “giant”.

Our shop had a 10" (small), 12" (medium) and 16" (large) for fifteen years. After our first year of owning it, I was really frustrated with all my competitors getting away with a 14" “large” and having my shop being viewed as expensive because of the price differences. But, I didn’t want to move down to a 14" for my large and cause my loyal customers to feel shorted.

One day I pulled up the POS and switched the name of the 16" to an XL, told my staff that’s what it was called now and changed all the cheat sheets by the phones that had our daily specials to reflect the new name. You know what happened? I started selling quite a few more daily specials to casual customers who were shopping around because they now understood what they were getting in relation to the other shops they had called.

I’ve fallen victim to the size game several times…

Today I offered a combo deal “featuring” a 14" Large NY Thin crust (made from a 14 oz DB) via a Facebook special/event…sold a few…

So on Wednesday, I’m having another “event” featuring a 14" Large (14 oz db) @ a price between my 12 medium & my 16" XL’’

It’ll be a 1-topping, pick-up only special…(luv the facebook specials & on-line orders…so easy…)

i guess it depends what your customers expect. a 14" as a large here would not pass. 16" is large. i would not call anything XL unless its bigger than 16".

I have a 10", 14" and 16". They used to be called “Small”, “Medium”, and “Large”, and this led to a perception that we were much more expensive. Around here a 12" is universally called “Medium” and the 14" “Large”. People would order a Medium, we’d give them the price and then there would be sticker shock. “How can it be so much for a medium pizza?”, they would ask.

Then we would have to explain the difference in sizes, and sometimes they would still think it was much more expensive because the 14" is “only 2 inches larger”. Then we’d have to explain how to calculate the area of a circle, and that the surface area increases exponentially with an increase in diameter, and that a 14" is actually 35% larger than a 12", not the 17% they are arriving at by doing the math on the diameter… And most of my employees still didn’t understand how that worked.

So we renamed our sizes to meet the standards of this area. They are now “Small”, “Large”, “Extra Large.” It took a few months of customer training, but I’m very glad we did it and got it over with. I agree with pjcampbell that you need to go with what your local standards are.

Robozig, are you planning on eliminating your 16"? I wouldn’t do that, keep it on the menu as “Extra Large”. It is surprisingly easy to upsell somebody ordering a “Large” to a 16".

we have a 10 small a 14 med and a 16 large 18 xl. we had the same problem most places have the 14 large so we stopped calling them small, med, large, xl. on all are menus and other stuff we call the by size. you get a 10" 14" 16" or 18". that way people now the size. it worked well for use to take of the words and just do sizes.