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Pizza Price Calculator: Are you getting the best deal?

There are so many options when it comes to ordering pizza, how do you know if you're getting the best deal? Don't worry, we've done the math for you.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Louisville Pizza Week wraps up Sunday, so you have a few more days to get your passports and bellies full. For our part, we’re solving a problem you didn’t even know you had:

Ordering the WRONG. SIZE. OF. PIZZA.

How many times have you found yourself in this situation: you’re ordering pizzas to feed the family, and you don’t know whether to get a couple of small pizzas, or one medium? Or two mediums rather than a large? Or go for the real win and get the extra-large? Turns out, there IS a correct answer here, and we are empowering you to save literally DOLLARS each year. 

Don’t panic, but also don’t mess this up. Over the course of a year, you could save enough money to buy ANOTHER PIZZA.

To solve this conundrum, we’re employing the high-power technology of math you learned in middle school. A pizza, you see, is a flat circle. So, we can take the total cost of the pizza (C), and the width of the pizza in inches (W), and plug it into this formula here: 

P = ((W/2)x(W/2)xπ)/C 

That will tell you how much you’re paying per square inch of pizza.

Spoiler alert: bigger is (almost) always better.

A small pizza is usually 8 inches across. When you plug that into the top half of the formula above, you find out that you get around 50.3 square inches of pizza. A medium, on the other hand, is often closer to 12 inches—which comes out to more than 113 square inches. It’s almost twice as much pizza. Ask yourself: when’s the last time you paid twice as much for a medium pizza than for a small?

It scales from there. A large pizza that’s 14 inches will yield 154 square inches of deliciosity. And an extra-large, at 18 inches, will give you a whopping 254 square inches (more than FIVE TIMES as much as a small).

Keep calm, and put your TI-83 calculator away, mister. Our scientists and researchers have developed our new, exclusive, WHAS 11 ON YOUR SIDE PIZZA PRICE CALCULATOR (patent pending) to take the guess work out for you. 

Credit: WHAS

Next time you’re in line, just put the cost of the pie you want, along with its size, into our fancy little form above. It will then tell you how much you’re paying per square inch, and you can walk out of that restaurant a money-saving champion.

Want to know "WHAS up" with something? Rob Harris is your guy. He's talking to some of the smartest people in our community to find out more about science, history, urban legends, local quirks, and more.

Have a question or topic you want him to check out? Send him a tweet or a Facebook post.

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