My friends, fellow soda drinkers of the world, if there is but one truth on this Earth, it is that you have been lied to about ice. In a fair world, this would be common knowledge to everyone, but alas, it is a well kept corporate secret.

First, take your conventional soft drink. Straight out of the soda fountain, the drink is poured and served cold, even sans ice. Do you ever ask yourself, why does an already cold drink come with ice? To put it simply, money. The concentration of the drink inside of a cup is greatly reduced when half of the cup’s volume is occupied by ice, and over a week’s time, any franchise employing this tactic will have saved millions on drink sales. While the average cost of a glass of ice in the US is approximately 1.5 cents, a glass of soda can cost up to a staggering five cents. In the end, you will end up paying over half of that drink’s price in a watery slush you won’t even touch.

To top it off, your ever-increasing concentration of ice in that drink only works to dilute the rich flavor you paid for with bitter ice water. Disgusting, I know, but it is a tried-and-true tactic restaurants have employed since before you were born, knowing full well that you, their faithful customer, would never so rudely ask for a drink without ice. But you can and should. That is the message I want to give you today.

My opponent, Hannah, has postulated only mere assumptions as to how the common consumer would prefer their beverages. But I don’t blame her. Like the rest of us, growing in an overly toxic and manipulative capitalist society, our opinions at the core are almost exclusively molded by those ideas which corporations have deemed lucrative to their success, the idea in question here being whether or not we need ice. I can assure you, we do not.