Sometime around 1994, a woman on the Lower East Side of Manhattan walked into a Burger King, ordered a large Coke, and paid 89 cents. Then she found out another Burger King — just a couple blocks away — was selling the exact same drink for 69 cents. The 20-cent difference made her angry enough to do what most of us would never bother doing: she took the biggest fast food chain in the world to small claims court.
Her story sounds like a joke. It’s not. And she wasn’t the last person to sue Burger King over pocket change. What started as one woman’s frustration over a Coca-Cola has turned into a pattern. Customers have been dragging Burger King into courtrooms for years — sometimes over a few bucks, sometimes over how big a Whopper looks on a poster. Here’s how it all went down.
The Original 20-Cent Lawsuit
The details of this case didn’t surface until about 20 years later, when a father and son recalled the incident to The New York Post in 2014. The father had worked in the New York court system and happened to be present when the woman showed up in Manhattan’s Small Claims Court. He asked her what the lawsuit was about, and her answer was beautifully simple: “Well, I had to walk two extra blocks.”
Her argument wasn’t just about the 20 cents. She felt she shouldn’t have been forced to walk to a different Burger King location to get a fair price on the same product. Both restaurants were owned by the same corporation. Both sold the same large Coke. Why was one charging 89 cents and the other 69? She wanted $100 in damages for the inconvenience.
Now, $100 might not sound like much, but in 1994, that could cover roughly two weeks of grocery staples for a family of four. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $222 today. She wasn’t trying to get rich — she was making a point.
Burger King Won Without Even Showing Up
Here’s the kicker: Burger King didn’t send a single representative to court. No lawyer. No manager. Nobody. And they still won the case.
That almost never happens. When a defendant doesn’t show up in small claims court, the plaintiff usually wins by default. The judge basically says, “Well, you didn’t bother defending yourself, so you lose.” But in this case, the court apparently decided that a 20-cent price difference between two separate franchise locations wasn’t something Burger King owed anyone money for. The case never came to fruition.
Was the woman wrong to sue? Depends on who you ask. Burger King franchises are independently operated, so different locations can set different prices. That’s not illegal — it’s just annoying. And \”annoying\” doesn’t usually hold up in court.
The Pennsylvania Couple Who Sued Over $17
Fast forward to November 2015. Doug and Patty Wargo of Pennsylvania walked into their local Burger King and ordered a meal. The restaurant got the order wrong, charged them again for the corrected order, and assured them the original charge of $17.35 would be refunded to their card within 7 to 10 business days.
It wasn’t. Not after 7 days. Not after 10. Not after repeated calls to the restaurant. Their bank didn’t see it either. So the Wargos did what any frustrated couple with time on their hands might do — they filed suit in Pennsylvania’s Magisterial District Court in Cumberland County for the $17.35, plus their $113.90 court filing fee.
Doug Wargo told a local news station, \”People go to jail for stealing less than that. It’s our money. We just want our money back.\”
Here’s where it gets good. A few days after the lawsuit was filed — and the local police department served Burger King with the papers — the $17.35 magically appeared in the Wargos’ bank account. Funny how that works, right? But it was too late. The couple had already paid the court filing fee out of pocket, and they weren’t about to eat that cost. They went ahead with the case to get Burger King to reimburse the $113.90.
The Wargos were landscapers. Winter was their off-season, which is the only reason they had time to fight it. They said they worried about other customers who might have been double-charged but didn’t notice — or didn’t have the time to do anything about it. They never went back to that Burger King. They said they wouldn’t be going back to any Burger King, period.
The Whopper That Looked Nothing Like the Ad
If you’ve ever opened a Whopper box and thought, \”This looks nothing like the picture,\” you’re not alone. In 2022, nineteen customers from thirteen states filed a class action lawsuit against Burger King, claiming that the chain’s advertisements made its burgers look approximately 35% larger than what you actually get. The lawsuit also alleged the ads showed more than double the meat compared to the real product.
The suit included side-by-side images — the brightly lit, towering burgers from Burger King’s marketing next to the sad, droopy reality that customers photographed. The plaintiffs argued this wasn’t just \”food styling.\” It was deceptive.
Burger King tried to get the case thrown out, calling the claims exaggeration. But in 2025, U.S. District Judge Roy K. Altman ruled the lawsuit could move forward. He said the plaintiffs’ allegations went beyond \”mere exaggeration or puffery\” — a legal term for the kind of harmless bragging that’s generally allowed in advertising. The judge pointed out that the case was different from a similar suit against McDonald’s and Wendy’s that had been dismissed, because the alleged exaggerations were more significant and the plaintiffs made a plausible claim that consumers were misled about actual size changes over time.
According to the lawsuit, Burger King started materially overstating the size of its burgers in advertising around September 2017. Comparing marketing images from before and after that date, the burgers appeared to have grown by about 35% in the ads — but the actual patty size never changed. A Burger King spokesperson said the claims were false.
This wasn’t even the first time Burger King got caught doing this. The United Kingdom’s advertising authority cited the company twelve years earlier for burgers that had \”height and thickness considerably less than what was advertised.\”
The Man Who Blamed Fast Food for His Heart Attacks
While we’re talking about fast food lawsuits, we can’t skip Caesar Barber. In 2002, the 56-year-old New York maintenance worker filed a class action lawsuit against McDonald’s, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Wendy’s. He was 5’10\”, weighed 270 pounds, had already suffered a heart attack, been diagnosed with diabetes, and had two more heart attacks. He ate at fast food chains about four times a week.
His argument: the restaurants never disclosed how unhealthy their food was, and they contributed to his obesity and health problems. He filed the lawsuit in New York Supreme Court.
The case was dismissed without prejudice in 2003, meaning he could have refiled with a stronger argument, but he never did. Still, his lawsuit was the first of its kind — a customer holding fast food companies responsible for not telling people what was in the food. A lot of the nutritional disclosure requirements you see in chain restaurants today trace their roots back to cases like his.
Burger King’s Pricing Still Doesn’t Make Sense
That 1994 lawsuit over soda pricing might seem like ancient history, but the same problem still exists. Burger King’s prices vary wildly from location to location, and the digital age has made it even more obvious. One Reddit user recently pointed out that a burger priced at $1.39 on the Burger King mobile app jumped to $1.69 just by changing their location. Same burger. Same app. Different price.
Franchise pricing is one of those things that makes perfect sense from a business perspective and absolutely no sense from a customer’s perspective. Rent is higher in some neighborhoods. Labor costs differ. Franchise owners set their own prices. All logical. But when you’re the one paying 30 cents more for a Coke because you walked into the wrong Burger King, logic doesn’t make you feel better.
Small Claims Court Is More Powerful Than You Think
The woman who sued over 20 cents lost. The Wargos who sued over $17 at least got their refund, even if it took a lawsuit to make it happen. The 19 customers suing over Whopper sizes are still fighting. But all of these cases share something in common: regular people decided a corporation wasn’t going to push them around.
Small claims court exists for exactly this reason. Filing fees are usually between $30 and $150 depending on your state. You don’t need a lawyer. You tell a judge your story, show your evidence, and hope for the best. Most cases are settled in under an hour. And sometimes — like with the Wargos — just filing the paperwork is enough to make a company suddenly find your refund.
Was the original 20-cent lawsuit frivolous? Probably. Did it make a difference? Not really. But the woman who filed it had the same instinct that every fast food customer has when they feel ripped off — she just had the guts to act on it. And thirty years later, people are still suing Burger King for basically the same reasons: the price doesn’t match, the product doesn’t match, and nobody at the company seems to care until a judge gets involved.
