What are the economics like on prepared drinks? Seems like transporting a bunch of water around is wasteful and expensive. I guess the revenues are so much greater than costs it doesn't matter - but here we have them shrinking the portion size.
The bottling plants for soda etc. tend to be fairly local. Syrup gets shipped further.
in that particular case, it boils down to how many you can fit on a pallet. if you get an extra row or column or both, you're now selling 550 bottles per pallet instead of 500.