3 restaurants in Arlington list sweet and sour chicken on their menus. The cheapest is Panda Cafe at $9.45, listed as Sweet & Sour Chicken. The typical price across town is $15.95, and the dearest we found is $17.95 at MaLaTang, so the two ends of the list are $8.50 apart, which is 90% more for the same dish. Of the 3 kitchens listed, 1 charges more than a dollar under the typical price, 1 sits within a dollar of it and 1 charges more than a dollar over.
Arlington is the only area where we track sweet and sour chicken at the moment, so there is no other town to set these prices against yet.
Where is the cheapest sweet and sour chicken in Arlington? Panda Cafe, at $9.45 on 5021 Wilson Boulevard. The same dish reaches $17.95 elsewhere in town, so where you order it changes the bill by $8.50.
What should sweet and sour chicken cost here? About $15.95 is the typical price across the 3 kitchens in Arlington that list it. Of the ones listed above, 1 is more than a dollar below that and 1 is more than a dollar above, so the typical price is a middle rather than a floor.
Why do the prices differ so much? We compare what each menu calls the same dish, and menus are not identical: portion, cut, sides and the kind of room you are sitting in all ride on the price, and none of that shows up in a number. Part portions and half sizes are kept out of this comparison, and a chain charging the same at several addresses is counted once, so the spread above is between genuinely different kitchens rather than the same one repeated.
Items are grouped by dish, so names vary a little between restaurants. Each price is what that menu listed on the date shown beside it, not a daily special, so a restaurant may have changed it since. The typical price is the middle of every price we hold for this dish in Arlington.