lol, this doesn’t say anything about charging for refills. it just says they are getting rid of the self-serve fountains in the dining area.

those things seem insane these days anyway. like the big touch screen robot where you pick your version from the coca-cola family of carbonated products and select a fruit flavor before pushing a single giant button to fill up. i bet the licensing arrangement coming from coke is total bullshit in terms of cartridges, maintenance/servicing agreements, and you know that thing is completely locked down. i watched some guy try to reload one earlier this summer and it looked like it was super annoying, because the touch screen response was very delayed and the loading mechanism was dumb. touch screens are so lame compared to mechanical shit.

when you factor in the labor cost of someone having to cleanup spills around the thing and just generally deal with its existence, i’m sure the franchisees would prefer to use their existing in-house relatively universal fountains, which they have to maintain anyway. i have no doubt this development is some kind of broader pushback to those dumb things that showed up in the last few years.