I worked for Burger King for a few years back home when I was younger. At the time, you could get a cheeseburger for $1. The ingredients of the sandwich cost maybe 40 cents, and the overhead involved in creating the finished product (including electricity, the machinery, labor, paper wrapping, someone to take the order, etc) was another 40-ish cents. So basically they made 20 cents on each cheeseburger they sold. If you get 1000 people ordering cheeseburgers, and nothing else, in a day, you're making $200 that day. That's not enough to cover the expense of the building being opened, the guy who cleans the kitchen, the woman who empties the trash in the parking lot, the manager's salary plus all 18 hours that there are employees in the building, getting paid whether they're making cheeseburgers or not.
So there's incentive to get them to buy drinks. Drinks cost only around 18 cents, including the cup, and it's self-serve so the only labor involved MIGHT be in filling the ice dispenser, and refilling the syrup bag once every couple of days.
If you give away the cup and the customer is only ordering a cheeseburger, it will cost your store money. But rather than say "no cup for cheeseburger buyers, you can only have a cup if you're buying a cheeseburger AND fries" - they say "there's a charge for the cup."
Seems fair to me, once you have the cup there's nothing preventing you from filling it with soda. We had that problem with kids in our store, so we eventually kicked them out. They'd buy a single small fry between them and ask for cups for water. And they'd fill them up with soda, drink the soda, then fill them again and leave the store with a second free cup of soda. Seniors were the worst - we'd get them come in, they'd buy a fry, unsalted (meaning - fresh, exclusively made just for them), grab a huge stack of napkins, and a free cup of senior coffee and sit there taking up space at the tables for hours - and go home with all those napkins.
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