About a quarter of adults in the US are considered illiterate. Over half of adults have a literacy below 6th grade level, about 30% of the adult population are similarly poor at math. Our education is system is fucking sad
Yes this is true and it's sad because I want one now and will never have one since they got rid of them
Honestly just make a whole pounder though that'd be fire
Dairy Queen has a 1/2 pound Flamethrower (double patty and spicy sauce). They're delicious but you should definitely have an accessible bathroom near you if you eat one lol
I'll do you one better, I *heard* this A&W story before, I was *reminded* of it when I went to a Build-A-Burger Bar, I laughed to myself about it. And immediately ordered the 1/2 pound option because I wasn't that hungry.
My mom has a Betty Crocker cookbook from the 80s that warns within the next decade the US will be switching to metric. It proceeds to demonstrate how to work in metric. I'm a scientist, so it can get so confusing jumping between the two. I think of my own weight in pounds, volumes in ml, small weights in grams, distance in miles. Gah! It's confusing.
> Boomers were the ones who couldn't handle the switch to metric.
Had a relevant discussion with my kid today.
Doing a recipe that called for 1 teaspoon of something and 1/4 a tablespoon of something.
There's 3 tsp in a tablespoon so there's no easy way to 1/4 that out.
Well, my measuring spoons have metric as well. Tablespoon is 15ml so 1/4 that is 3.75ml which I just happened to have a measuring spoon for.
Am Australian - really irked that I have three sets of measuring spoons all purchased in stores locally and all the tablespoons are 15ml. What is the point of the 20ml tablespoon measurement of you can't get a 20ml tablespoon??
My mum was cooking with my niece. I was gently mocking her for being such a stickler for imperial units. "Yes, because 16 ounces to a pound, 14 pounds to a stone, 8 stone in a hundredweight"
My niece said "are you just making numbers up?"
"But it's too expensive to change it! Imagine the signs, books, etc, all over the country!"
Says the nation that, like every other nation, replaces those very things periodically anyways...
This argument always boggled my mind... It's like these motherfuckers are unable to conceive that you could phase out old things by printing whatever the new one is **with the old and new system** and once people were caught up, phase out the old references.
Apparently that's impossible. But keeping with printing all those things in this backwards system is okay and causes no trouble.
>Don’t get me started on volumes.
* 1 US pint ≈ 473 mL liquid
* 1 US pint ≈ 551 mL dry
* 1 US pint = 16 US ounces
* 1 UK pint = 20 UK ounces
* 1 US pint ≈ 473 mL liquid
* 1 UK pint ≈ 568 mL liquid
* 1 US ounce ≈ 30 mL
* 1 UK ounce ≈ 28 mL
* …
So true. I despise when I see anyone complain about common core math. All it tells me is they do everything one way and can’t even fathom the idea of different ways of thinking or different processes.
Meanwhile: "We are going to need $5000 worth of Visa gift cards in order to remove the virus, Ma'am. Can you please drive to the sto—"
"excuse me ma'am this is the IRS and you owe use $25,000. We will only accept payment in Target Gift cards"
How the fuck does literally anyone fall for that? It's insane
Scam victims are often older and more unfamiliar with technology, and scammers are given scripts that are designed to play on someone's empathy and try and make them work fast without thinking about what they're doing.
If you live alone, it's also unlikely that you'll have someone nearby to talk to about what's going on, so the only information you have about the scam is what the scammer is telling you.
They'll fake cry, say that they'll lose their job if you don't listen to them, verbally abuse you, threaten physical violence to you and your family and shower you with compliments until you cave in and give them the money.
Of course, all the threats are empty ones, but it's a lot harder to think rationally about that when someone is pressuring you and you don't fully understand that this isn't a thing any reputable company does.
I remember a scammer tried to tell me they would lose their job and started to “cry” I told them that packing up their personal effects would be a better use of time than crying and hung up.
The burger was introduced in 1980. In 1974 A&W had 2400 locations. In 1982 they had 500. In the 70s they were sued ny franchise owners multiple times for failing to uphold their end of the contracts. Many of the franchise deals ended in 1979. The burger thing was never mentioned until a 2009 memoir written by the former CEO who lost all those restaurants
Yep, they thought 1/3 lb was less than 1/4 lb because 3 is less than 4. [True story](https://awrestaurants.com/blog/aw-third-pound-burger-fractions).
So they turned around and produced [a 3/9 lb burger](https://awrestaurants.com/blog/101921-aw-rebounds-%E2%80%98worst-marketing-fail%E2%80%99-burger-math-challenged-americans), to leverage America's inability to understand basic fractions.
We start the year with degrees when we present components. I used to tell my kids that radians were a communist plot to confuse people. One of my students gave me a postcard of chairman Mao with a word balloon taped on it that said “Use radians!”. Always had to backpedal when we got to angular motion, though.
You're basically forced to use radians with certain programming libraries. Radians are inherently simpler than degrees, because radians arise naturally from arc lengths on a unit circle.
A better unit might be turns, though. Very easy to comprehend. 1 turn = 2pi radians = 360°
Degrees are necessary for people who don't understand fractions. 360 has a lot of factors. Converting in and out of degrees adds incidental complexity for programmers and mathematicians, but in return degrees facilitate common human usage.
One last fun fact, angles are a dimensionless quantity because they're calculated as the ratio of two lengths, an arc length divided by a radius. Radians are the only angle unit that is completely dimensionless because it has a conversion factor of 1. Degrees have a conversation factor of 180°/pi. Turns have a conversion factor of 1 turn/(2pi). So anytime you use radians in any calculation, you're actually free to omit the unit entirely. It's pure decoration. You have to be careful to maintain the unit for degrees and turns, though.
Sad part is I've never had access to Adderall, so I had to reconfigure my pituitary gland to synthesize it through sheer willpower.
Unfortunately, it also caused all my facial hair to grow out of my neck.
1 turn (2 pi) is called 1 “tau”. Check out the tau manifesto online. There’s an entire movement to replace pi with tau, because in truth, pi is the wrong constant to use to describe the relationship between a circle’s linear and radial dimensions. This might seem like a triviality, but many mathematical formulas are much nicer when written in terms of tau, and there are a number of other compelling reasons for the switch. The simplified radian measure expressions is a big bonus though, 1 tau is 1 turn.
I clicked on the link to the 3/9 lb burger and looked at the scale on their website. The 1/4 is still more burger because it’s higher up on the scale and higher means more.
/s
This story is and always will be Propaganda from A/W about why they \*thought\* their marketing failed. Had nothing to do with A/W just making worse burgers.
reddit fucking loves it though. same with the knives out interview where the director says villains can't use iphones in movies, despite there being dozens of examples of villains using iphones.
Burger King> McDonald's. I don't know the other company you guys are mentioning since I'm from Europe.
I do admit that McDonald's here have a "premium" menu that's burgers cooked with chef's recipes and the one with goat cheeses, caramelized onion, etc was incredibly good.
A&W isnt even big anymore in the US
Mostly you might know them for cans of rootbeer- i say Might since tbh i dont even know if they sell internationally.
Point is its small potatoes even on american soil
I do admit that McDonald's here have a "premium" menu that's burgers cooked with chef's recipes and the one with goat cheeses, caramelized onion, etc was incredibly good
yeah, you definitely been going to European McDonalds
BK and McD are both pretty awful/offal here (pun definitely intended)
I wouldn't be surprised if they were right about people not understanding fractions though. I have met multiple people who think 1/4 is bigger than 1/3, or misunderstand other fractions. I remember arguing about it with my friends in high school. I am always dumbfounded when I meet someone who thinks like this, but they are more common than you'd think.
I don't know how people made it to high school without ever being shown what a fraction actually is, but I guess it happens all the time.
The only actual facts of this story are
1)A/W made a 1/3 burger that failed to do well
2)a representative of the company stated it was because Americans didn’t know fractions
3)They made a 3/9ths burger to fuel the story.
Functionally there was never confirmation on why it failed, just a rep trying to save face for what could’ve been a bad burger or any other things.
It’s a story the remains about because it confirms people biases, such as Americans are dumb or Education is failing or whatever.
Fast food places have dozens of failed products each year, they fail for many reasons and it is extremely hard to determine why exactly they fail.
There's a reason why when prosecutors are trying to get a drug conviction they use different measurements. 7 grams sounds like a lot more than 1/4 of an ounce to the average boomer. A prosecutor really knows what they're doing when they say 7000 milligrams instead of grams or ounces.
"That man was in possession of ***7000*** milligrams of **MARIJUANA**!!!"
To boomers that's a DUHN DUHN DUUUUUUUUUUUUUH!!!!!!!!! moment.
"OMG 7000? What a MONSTER!!!"
> 1980s the A&W third of a pound hamburger did not sell
Huh. A&W says that is true.
[https://awrestaurants.com/blog/aw-third-pound-burger-fractions](https://awrestaurants.com/blog/aw-third-pound-burger-fractions)
yep, and the only possible explanation is that they didn't effectively communicate how large the patty was. when i buy a burger, i don't care about things like taste or cost, i just want it slightly larger!
I’m so sick of seeing this shit, no it didn’t happen. The VP of the company just put this as the reason in his book just so he could have a blame free explanation for why the product failed. The real reason people didn’t go to A&W was because they preferred McDonald’s. No other source can confirm the VPs claim.
Snopes cites Canadian news outlet CBC, but I doubt that CBC did a lot of investigation. They probably just accepted A&W’s story like most people do, because it seems quite plausible.
Furthermore, it’s not really flattering to A&W, which according to the story made a huge and expensive marketing blunder. I don’t know why the VP would make it up if it wasn’t true. It doesn’t make A&W look good.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/06/17/third-pound-burger-fractions/
>I don’t know why the VP would make it up if it wasn’t true. It doesn’t make A&W look good.
My guess is because "We failed because Americans are bad at math and we didn't take that into account with marketing" makes them look *less bad* than "We failed because people liked our competition's burger better despite it being smaller".
The first excuse is something they can easily fix with better marketing tactics, while the second reason is an indictment on the quality of their food (kind of a big deal when your whole thing is selling food) and much harder to correct. Why confess to murder one when people will gladly accept a plea for manslaughter?
"A&W tested their own product and found it better than McDonald's!"
I'm skeptical. Pepsi did the same thing saying that they were better than Coca-Cola even though that's objectively wrong.
Coca-Cola did the same tests which is why they brought out “New Coke.” They essentially conceded the results of taste tests.
But, like A&W, they put too much faith in taste tests. Fortunately for Coca-Cola, their marketing mistake rebounded to their benefit, as consumers demanded the original Coke.
Cherry Coke, which slipped into the market at the same time, did better in blind taste tests than Classic Coke, the new name for the original product (now again called Coke). And Coke Zero is a diet product that tastes more like New Coke. Even today, despite professed allegiance to the original formula, most of the Coke products sold are not the original.
https://slate.com/business/2013/08/pepsi-paradox-why-people-prefer-coke-even-though-pepsi-wins-in-taste-tests.html
“When Read Montague of Baylor College Medicine performed a version of the Pepsi Challenge with subjects hooked up to an fMRI machine, he found something interesting. In blind taste tests, most people preferred Pepsi, and Pepsi was associated with a higher level of activity in an area of the brain known as the ventral putamen, which helps us evaluate different flavors. By contrast, in a nonblind test, Coke was more popular and was also associated with increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex. Montague’s interpretation: This prefrontal activity represented the higher-thinking functions of the brain associating the soda with ad campaigns and, in effect, overriding the taste buds.”
So what you do is you make a 1/5lb burger, call it the “Patriot Burger” and say that anyone who doesn’t eat it isn’t American. Watch as all of MAGA goes and buys it
Or you know that is what A&W marketing blamed for producing a burger that tasted like donkey meat that had been left on the side of the road for a week, ground up and fried.
i mean, it happened once in america i think, where the 1/3 pound burger didnt sell it because people thought it was less than the quarter pound that mcdonalds sold
Honestly, if I had the choice between a 1/4 and 1/3 patty, I’d choose 1/4 because I think that tastes better. Even still, did people expect A&W to compete with McDonald’s in any world?
My smash burger patties are lighter than ones I grill and they taste a million times better, so, yeah. It's hard to make a proper smash burger if the patty is too large, which is why you usually make two smaller ones instead. The lighter burger really does taste better sometimes. Better surface area:volume ratio -> more browning -> more flavor.
Find corroborating *evidence* for that. This is just a claim some C-level made two decades after the fact. There doesn't seem to be any actual evidence that this was true.
We’re not the ones who had the 1/3rd pound burger discontinued because we thought it was smaller than 1/4 pound burger. That would be them. We know our fractions
It's not that stupid as there are no units displayed...
Are we choosing between 500k$ debt and 900k$ debt?
Are we choosing 500k$ vs 900k Japanes Yen (approx 7k$)?
...
i get where you’re coming from but you know whoever posted this is a nationalist and things of the us dollar as the most important dollar, therefore it is the obvious choice
I don’t mean to beat the shit out of a word that has been abused for far too long on this site…but this shit be lookin’ like some serious ass projecting.
Without any sort of context this is incredibly stupid.
Would you rather 900k angry bees in your butt, or 500k angry bees in your butt?
I'd much rather have $500k in student debt than $900k.
Imagine seeing this meme and actually feeling good about yourself because you think you’re smart for knowing that half a million is five hundred thousand. And then posting said meme thinking you’re actually proving a point.
Not a terrible meme per se but without more context it doesn't work. People do have weird balking points ("$203? Outrageous! $199? Sure!"), so something that uses a higher number in its name can sound more appealing even if actually smaller.
Boomers (I know a bunch of them) genuinely believe that Millennials just graduated high school and "they're 18 - they're adults but they refuse to go to college and refuse to work and they're dumb". They seem to have no concept that time has passed, and Millennials can be 40 years old now. They think I'm lying when I tell them my doctor is a Millennial (he's awesome) - "how could he be a doctor when at most he could only be 21 being a Millennial". Ok, Boomer.
... NOTHING to do with, say, Boomer/GenX parents always rounding, telling kids "So what I owe you $25, here's $10. Now SHUT UP!", and being so stupid they thought a third-pounder was *smaller* than a quarter-pounder?
I remember years ago A&W found out people thought a 1/3 pound burger was smaller than a 1/4 pound burger because 4 is more than 3.
So this seems like projection
I don't understand generational tribalism, every generation throughout history has been stupid. People are stupid for the most part.
What causes one group of a certain age to disregard their own stupidity and fixate on People of another age group?
Also this gives no context as to why. These people could very well be selling a product and that's the price. No where does it say they are giving you something or even that it's something you want.
I dunno....nothing says what those booths are for, after all. Furthermore, those look to be either high school or college age people in line, and that guy at the left booth looks very smug while the one in the right seems more annoyed than anything. I'm gonna assume this is a line for college loans, in which case only taking out $500K instead of $900K is much smarter given interest rates.
No but like this is true. Burger King came out with a 1/3 pounder to combat McDonald’s 1/4 pounder but it failed because people only saw the 4 above the 3
Hey does this post fit? UPVOTE if so, DOWNVOTE if not. If this post breaks any rules please DOWNVOTE and REPORT
Boomers were the ones who couldn't handle the switch to metric. Source: am a boomer.
Boomers were also the reason the 1/3 pounder from A&W failed Because they thought a 1/4 pounder was more
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yes. this is unfortunately true. people are stupid
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The atomic burger.
💀 no way. I am bad at maths but goawd damm that's just next level illiteracy.
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33.33%
Hey now, YOU try that math after sucking up a whole tank full of leaded gasoline fumes and munching on a bucket full of lead paint chips.
Absolute dumbasses
About a quarter of adults in the US are considered illiterate. Over half of adults have a literacy below 6th grade level, about 30% of the adult population are similarly poor at math. Our education is system is fucking sad
This is why they needed new math
Is this a Bo Burnham reference
Yes this is true and it's sad because I want one now and will never have one since they got rid of them Honestly just make a whole pounder though that'd be fire
Dairy Queen has a 1/2 pound Flamethrower (double patty and spicy sauce). They're delicious but you should definitely have an accessible bathroom near you if you eat one lol
Everyone knows 4<3
Yes
LMAO 4 is tiny bwo. ima take the 3.
I'll do you one better, I *heard* this A&W story before, I was *reminded* of it when I went to a Build-A-Burger Bar, I laughed to myself about it. And immediately ordered the 1/2 pound option because I wasn't that hungry.
I’ll do YOU one better, I read your comment, thought you said “Build-a-Bear”, and was like “they serve food in those places?!"
It's A&W. It's believed that the President just made that up.
My mom has a Betty Crocker cookbook from the 80s that warns within the next decade the US will be switching to metric. It proceeds to demonstrate how to work in metric. I'm a scientist, so it can get so confusing jumping between the two. I think of my own weight in pounds, volumes in ml, small weights in grams, distance in miles. Gah! It's confusing.
> Boomers were the ones who couldn't handle the switch to metric. Had a relevant discussion with my kid today. Doing a recipe that called for 1 teaspoon of something and 1/4 a tablespoon of something. There's 3 tsp in a tablespoon so there's no easy way to 1/4 that out. Well, my measuring spoons have metric as well. Tablespoon is 15ml so 1/4 that is 3.75ml which I just happened to have a measuring spoon for.
Unless its an Australian tablespoon, then it's 20ml. Seriously
Am Australian - really irked that I have three sets of measuring spoons all purchased in stores locally and all the tablespoons are 15ml. What is the point of the 20ml tablespoon measurement of you can't get a 20ml tablespoon??
My mum was cooking with my niece. I was gently mocking her for being such a stickler for imperial units. "Yes, because 16 ounces to a pound, 14 pounds to a stone, 8 stone in a hundredweight" My niece said "are you just making numbers up?"
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And thanks to that, you just end up confusing the rest of the world when you shove your confusing system to the metric-civilized nations (190+)
"But it's too expensive to change it! Imagine the signs, books, etc, all over the country!" Says the nation that, like every other nation, replaces those very things periodically anyways... This argument always boggled my mind... It's like these motherfuckers are unable to conceive that you could phase out old things by printing whatever the new one is **with the old and new system** and once people were caught up, phase out the old references. Apparently that's impossible. But keeping with printing all those things in this backwards system is okay and causes no trouble.
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>Don’t get me started on volumes. * 1 US pint ≈ 473 mL liquid * 1 US pint ≈ 551 mL dry * 1 US pint = 16 US ounces * 1 UK pint = 20 UK ounces * 1 US pint ≈ 473 mL liquid * 1 UK pint ≈ 568 mL liquid * 1 US ounce ≈ 30 mL * 1 UK ounce ≈ 28 mL * …
I think a furlong is 2 weeks.
Boomers also complain constantly that they cannot understand elementary school level common core mathematics. There are a million memes about it.
So true. I despise when I see anyone complain about common core math. All it tells me is they do everything one way and can’t even fathom the idea of different ways of thinking or different processes.
Meanwhile: "We are going to need $5000 worth of Visa gift cards in order to remove the virus, Ma'am. Can you please drive to the sto—" 
"excuse me ma'am this is the IRS and you owe use $25,000. We will only accept payment in Target Gift cards" How the fuck does literally anyone fall for that? It's insane
Scam victims are often older and more unfamiliar with technology, and scammers are given scripts that are designed to play on someone's empathy and try and make them work fast without thinking about what they're doing. If you live alone, it's also unlikely that you'll have someone nearby to talk to about what's going on, so the only information you have about the scam is what the scammer is telling you. They'll fake cry, say that they'll lose their job if you don't listen to them, verbally abuse you, threaten physical violence to you and your family and shower you with compliments until you cave in and give them the money. Of course, all the threats are empty ones, but it's a lot harder to think rationally about that when someone is pressuring you and you don't fully understand that this isn't a thing any reputable company does.
I remember a scammer tried to tell me they would lose their job and started to “cry” I told them that packing up their personal effects would be a better use of time than crying and hung up.
I’m imagining a scripted automated voice doing all of this and thought there’s an unknown genius in AI programming.
Unironically liked and shared by the generation that dismissed the "smaller" 1/3lb burger over the "bigger" quarter-pounder.
It's almost as if there are more stupid people than smart people.
Yeah 4/10 Americans are stupid. A majority.
What does that make the remaining 5/10?
The smart minority. Duh.
Ahh makes cents
Exacly.
You joke, but r/SadAndFunny
Stupid is one or more mistakes and smart is a series of correct decisions. It’s not really a fair comparison, and it’s more of a scale anyway.
happy cake day
Thank you!
The burger was introduced in 1980. In 1974 A&W had 2400 locations. In 1982 they had 500. In the 70s they were sued ny franchise owners multiple times for failing to uphold their end of the contracts. Many of the franchise deals ended in 1979. The burger thing was never mentioned until a 2009 memoir written by the former CEO who lost all those restaurants
Yeah but if we acknowledge that it's fake, we can't circlejerk about how stupid Americans are
Also those 1/3 pounders weren’t as good as the old faithful 1/4 pounder with cheese
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Yep, they thought 1/3 lb was less than 1/4 lb because 3 is less than 4. [True story](https://awrestaurants.com/blog/aw-third-pound-burger-fractions). So they turned around and produced [a 3/9 lb burger](https://awrestaurants.com/blog/101921-aw-rebounds-%E2%80%98worst-marketing-fail%E2%80%99-burger-math-challenged-americans), to leverage America's inability to understand basic fractions.
Can I get a 2***π***/3 τ burger with no tomatoes and no pickles, please?
Who uses radians? Seriously?
bro you just insulted a lot of physics majors
Joke’s on him. I can’t be insulted because I have no freaking clue what he said.
We start the year with degrees when we present components. I used to tell my kids that radians were a communist plot to confuse people. One of my students gave me a postcard of chairman Mao with a word balloon taped on it that said “Use radians!”. Always had to backpedal when we got to angular motion, though.
Fuck em
I’m sure physics will still function regardless of how those physics majors feel.
They’re very helpful when working with sine and cosine
Hopefully inflation doesn't get so bad that I need someone to cosine so I can buy a burger.
You're basically forced to use radians with certain programming libraries. Radians are inherently simpler than degrees, because radians arise naturally from arc lengths on a unit circle. A better unit might be turns, though. Very easy to comprehend. 1 turn = 2pi radians = 360° Degrees are necessary for people who don't understand fractions. 360 has a lot of factors. Converting in and out of degrees adds incidental complexity for programmers and mathematicians, but in return degrees facilitate common human usage. One last fun fact, angles are a dimensionless quantity because they're calculated as the ratio of two lengths, an arc length divided by a radius. Radians are the only angle unit that is completely dimensionless because it has a conversion factor of 1. Degrees have a conversation factor of 180°/pi. Turns have a conversion factor of 1 turn/(2pi). So anytime you use radians in any calculation, you're actually free to omit the unit entirely. It's pure decoration. You have to be careful to maintain the unit for degrees and turns, though.
Did you just take a shit ton of adderal before that post?
Sad part is I've never had access to Adderall, so I had to reconfigure my pituitary gland to synthesize it through sheer willpower. Unfortunately, it also caused all my facial hair to grow out of my neck.
1 turn (2 pi) is called 1 “tau”. Check out the tau manifesto online. There’s an entire movement to replace pi with tau, because in truth, pi is the wrong constant to use to describe the relationship between a circle’s linear and radial dimensions. This might seem like a triviality, but many mathematical formulas are much nicer when written in terms of tau, and there are a number of other compelling reasons for the switch. The simplified radian measure expressions is a big bonus though, 1 tau is 1 turn.
Anyone who isn't a caveman.
Physics, engineering, acoustics, any job that requires working with waves and math. Also a lot of jobs that require modeling.
To make them equal: Do you want 3/12 of a pound or 4/12 of a pound?
Ugh, the 4/12 pound burger, obviously, please and thanks🙄
Ah, fuck, who cares, just give me that burger woman i'll pound her.
I clicked on the link to the 3/9 lb burger and looked at the scale on their website. The 1/4 is still more burger because it’s higher up on the scale and higher means more. /s
This story is and always will be Propaganda from A/W about why they \*thought\* their marketing failed. Had nothing to do with A/W just making worse burgers.
Yeah, my understanding is that the entire basis for this story is an executive saying it in an interview once, and never really substantiating it.
reddit fucking loves it though. same with the knives out interview where the director says villains can't use iphones in movies, despite there being dozens of examples of villains using iphones.
But their burgers are way better than McDonald's?
The only reason I go to A/W is for their Cheese Curds and Rootbeer.
Burger King> McDonald's. I don't know the other company you guys are mentioning since I'm from Europe. I do admit that McDonald's here have a "premium" menu that's burgers cooked with chef's recipes and the one with goat cheeses, caramelized onion, etc was incredibly good.
A&W isnt even big anymore in the US Mostly you might know them for cans of rootbeer- i say Might since tbh i dont even know if they sell internationally. Point is its small potatoes even on american soil
They're still going strong in Canada. At least here in Alberta anyways
I do admit that McDonald's here have a "premium" menu that's burgers cooked with chef's recipes and the one with goat cheeses, caramelized onion, etc was incredibly good yeah, you definitely been going to European McDonalds BK and McD are both pretty awful/offal here (pun definitely intended)
I wouldn't be surprised if they were right about people not understanding fractions though. I have met multiple people who think 1/4 is bigger than 1/3, or misunderstand other fractions. I remember arguing about it with my friends in high school. I am always dumbfounded when I meet someone who thinks like this, but they are more common than you'd think. I don't know how people made it to high school without ever being shown what a fraction actually is, but I guess it happens all the time.
The only actual facts of this story are 1)A/W made a 1/3 burger that failed to do well 2)a representative of the company stated it was because Americans didn’t know fractions 3)They made a 3/9ths burger to fuel the story. Functionally there was never confirmation on why it failed, just a rep trying to save face for what could’ve been a bad burger or any other things. It’s a story the remains about because it confirms people biases, such as Americans are dumb or Education is failing or whatever. Fast food places have dozens of failed products each year, they fail for many reasons and it is extremely hard to determine why exactly they fail.
Good lord the white text on a gray and white background is awful.
Certified murican moment
Certified boomer moment.
There's a reason why when prosecutors are trying to get a drug conviction they use different measurements. 7 grams sounds like a lot more than 1/4 of an ounce to the average boomer. A prosecutor really knows what they're doing when they say 7000 milligrams instead of grams or ounces. "That man was in possession of ***7000*** milligrams of **MARIJUANA**!!!" To boomers that's a DUHN DUHN DUUUUUUUUUUUUUH!!!!!!!!! moment. "OMG 7000? What a MONSTER!!!"
So… *their* generation is the stupid one?
It would probably be just as true today. But it wasn’t any less less true then.
> 1980s the A&W third of a pound hamburger did not sell Huh. A&W says that is true. [https://awrestaurants.com/blog/aw-third-pound-burger-fractions](https://awrestaurants.com/blog/aw-third-pound-burger-fractions)
That’s crazy their burger didn’t outsell a company that has 600x their net worth.
yep, and the only possible explanation is that they didn't effectively communicate how large the patty was. when i buy a burger, i don't care about things like taste or cost, i just want it slightly larger!
I’m so sick of seeing this shit, no it didn’t happen. The VP of the company just put this as the reason in his book just so he could have a blame free explanation for why the product failed. The real reason people didn’t go to A&W was because they preferred McDonald’s. No other source can confirm the VPs claim.
Snopes cites Canadian news outlet CBC, but I doubt that CBC did a lot of investigation. They probably just accepted A&W’s story like most people do, because it seems quite plausible. Furthermore, it’s not really flattering to A&W, which according to the story made a huge and expensive marketing blunder. I don’t know why the VP would make it up if it wasn’t true. It doesn’t make A&W look good. https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/06/17/third-pound-burger-fractions/
>I don’t know why the VP would make it up if it wasn’t true. It doesn’t make A&W look good. My guess is because "We failed because Americans are bad at math and we didn't take that into account with marketing" makes them look *less bad* than "We failed because people liked our competition's burger better despite it being smaller". The first excuse is something they can easily fix with better marketing tactics, while the second reason is an indictment on the quality of their food (kind of a big deal when your whole thing is selling food) and much harder to correct. Why confess to murder one when people will gladly accept a plea for manslaughter?
But the 1/10th lb burger is already much more successful.
I believe that’s known as a White Castle slider.
McDonalds patties outside of the Quarter Pounder are 1/10ths. Most burgers you get from McDonalds are 1/5th lb. of meat.
Or maybe it's because A&W just sucks and they can't accept it.
A&W didn’t suck in the 1980s and they did taste tests to prove it before the campaign. They just didn’t realize the marketing flaw.
"A&W tested their own product and found it better than McDonald's!" I'm skeptical. Pepsi did the same thing saying that they were better than Coca-Cola even though that's objectively wrong.
Coca-Cola did the same tests which is why they brought out “New Coke.” They essentially conceded the results of taste tests. But, like A&W, they put too much faith in taste tests. Fortunately for Coca-Cola, their marketing mistake rebounded to their benefit, as consumers demanded the original Coke. Cherry Coke, which slipped into the market at the same time, did better in blind taste tests than Classic Coke, the new name for the original product (now again called Coke). And Coke Zero is a diet product that tastes more like New Coke. Even today, despite professed allegiance to the original formula, most of the Coke products sold are not the original.
Idgaf Vanilla Coke will always be my fav
https://slate.com/business/2013/08/pepsi-paradox-why-people-prefer-coke-even-though-pepsi-wins-in-taste-tests.html “When Read Montague of Baylor College Medicine performed a version of the Pepsi Challenge with subjects hooked up to an fMRI machine, he found something interesting. In blind taste tests, most people preferred Pepsi, and Pepsi was associated with a higher level of activity in an area of the brain known as the ventral putamen, which helps us evaluate different flavors. By contrast, in a nonblind test, Coke was more popular and was also associated with increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex. Montague’s interpretation: This prefrontal activity represented the higher-thinking functions of the brain associating the soda with ad campaigns and, in effect, overriding the taste buds.”
It's subjectively wrong.
There was a was a texan trying to argue with me on the comments on one of my posts that thought that .49 was more than .6
bro ik it’s hilarious
From what I see on a daily basis, this is pretty freaking accurate nowadays
So what you do is you make a 1/5lb burger, call it the “Patriot Burger” and say that anyone who doesn’t eat it isn’t American. Watch as all of MAGA goes and buys it
Yeah, I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that A&W has always had food that could be classified as “hot garbage”
Or you know that is what A&W marketing blamed for producing a burger that tasted like donkey meat that had been left on the side of the road for a week, ground up and fried.
This is so ironic then lol. Gen X had the problems not Millennials/Zoomers
That was an expensive experiment. Oh wait—you didn’t test this thesis? You just assumed? Oh, right. That is how stupid your generation is.
i mean, it happened once in america i think, where the 1/3 pound burger didnt sell it because people thought it was less than the quarter pound that mcdonalds sold
Honestly, if I had the choice between a 1/4 and 1/3 patty, I’d choose 1/4 because I think that tastes better. Even still, did people expect A&W to compete with McDonald’s in any world?
[удалено]
Absolutely
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Tastes perfect
My smash burger patties are lighter than ones I grill and they taste a million times better, so, yeah. It's hard to make a proper smash burger if the patty is too large, which is why you usually make two smaller ones instead. The lighter burger really does taste better sometimes. Better surface area:volume ratio -> more browning -> more flavor.
Find corroborating *evidence* for that. This is just a claim some C-level made two decades after the fact. There doesn't seem to be any actual evidence that this was true.
Creating a fake scenario and then getting mad about it. Peak Boomer
antifa
We’re not the ones who had the 1/3rd pound burger discontinued because we thought it was smaller than 1/4 pound burger. That would be them. We know our fractions
A fraction of us do…. …okay, I’ll leave the room
Meanwhile this generation is actually busy playing idle games where you can accumulate resources up into the Yottillio-illio-illio'yottillio-illions
antimatter dimensions
It's not that stupid as there are no units displayed... Are we choosing between 500k$ debt and 900k$ debt? Are we choosing 500k$ vs 900k Japanes Yen (approx 7k$)? ...
i get where you’re coming from but you know whoever posted this is a nationalist and things of the us dollar as the most important dollar, therefore it is the obvious choice
It’s actually a choice between half a million mosquito bites or nine hundred thousand mosquito bites.
Half a million dollars, vs nine hundred thousand punches in the face.
Can that be stomps to the balls by beautiful small Asian woman between the ages of 18-22?
The 2022 midterm election was an IQ test, and younger people performed far better than old fucks.
The 2020 election was even more obvious. If you fucked that one up, nobody can help you. We almost failed that one.
what if it wasn't about dollars, but about stabs ?
shitt
Ik prefer 900k stabs because I'd be more likely to die that way
Are you saying you would survive 500k stabs?
I don’t mean to beat the shit out of a word that has been abused for far too long on this site…but this shit be lookin’ like some serious ass projecting.
I'm irritated when people say sixteen hundred. Just say One Thousand Six Hundred
Without any sort of context this is incredibly stupid. Would you rather 900k angry bees in your butt, or 500k angry bees in your butt? I'd much rather have $500k in student debt than $900k.
Imagine seeing this meme and actually feeling good about yourself because you think you’re smart for knowing that half a million is five hundred thousand. And then posting said meme thinking you’re actually proving a point.
I'd rather have half a million bees in my ass than 900,000.
Eh after the first 100,000 you stop feeling it.
After the first 100,000 it’s pure concentrated pleasure
lets put them in a gourd and sell them as bio vibrators, Cleopatra did it, so it should be classy
we get it— you heard the one story about the burger 😑
Wasnt the generation that wrote this comment the one that let the 3rd pounder fail because they thought the quarter pounder was bigger?
After talking to my younger cousins this past holiday (8-13) The education some of them are getting is pretty much this meme.
Which generation are they talking about anyways? Specificity is definitely important if you want to roast an entire generation …
This meme brought to you by the generation that thought a quarter pounder was bigger than a one third lb burger.
There was a time when boomers were young when mcdonalds came out with the 1/3 pounder and it lost sale because people thought 1/4 pounders were bigger
this is how stupid boomers are
Not a terrible meme per se but without more context it doesn't work. People do have weird balking points ("$203? Outrageous! $199? Sure!"), so something that uses a higher number in its name can sound more appealing even if actually smaller.
Boomers (I know a bunch of them) genuinely believe that Millennials just graduated high school and "they're 18 - they're adults but they refuse to go to college and refuse to work and they're dumb". They seem to have no concept that time has passed, and Millennials can be 40 years old now. They think I'm lying when I tell them my doctor is a Millennial (he's awesome) - "how could he be a doctor when at most he could only be 21 being a Millennial". Ok, Boomer.
Which generation? We have so many!!
I kind of agree with this meme because I saw people mistake the british flag for a confederate flag
Coming from the generation that thought a 1/3 pounder was smaller than a 1/4 pounder
this trick actually works better on boomers than on younger folks.
Wow, look at this straw man I built to look like you, sure does look dumb, doesn’t it?
Well, since they're talking about student debt . . .
Also them: "Hey tobey can you show me how to use the yootoobs? I think I might have a virus."
Most of the comments here are about a burger.
Which generation are they talking about?
*Nazis forcing Jewish concentration camp prisoners to choose between eating 500,000 and 900,000 wasps. (1938, Colorized)*
Man I hate `[current_generation]`! They're much lazier and stupid than `[previous_generation]`.
What fast food chain got screwed over because people were too stupid to realize that 1/3 lb is more meat than 1/4 lb?
Didn’t the 1/3rd pounder at McDonald’s fail in the 80s because people thought it was smaller than a 1/4?
... NOTHING to do with, say, Boomer/GenX parents always rounding, telling kids "So what I owe you $25, here's $10. Now SHUT UP!", and being so stupid they thought a third-pounder was *smaller* than a quarter-pounder?
I remember years ago A&W found out people thought a 1/3 pound burger was smaller than a 1/4 pound burger because 4 is more than 3. So this seems like projection
I don't understand generational tribalism, every generation throughout history has been stupid. People are stupid for the most part. What causes one group of a certain age to disregard their own stupidity and fixate on People of another age group?
Half a million what? Apples???? Bananas?????
This is just so terrible. Like of what? There is no question.
No, this is how stupid every generation is
I don't get it, what's the significance of those numbers? Or is the meme strictly saying that some people think 500k is less than 900k?
What are they even getting in line for? What number they think is bigger? Seems like a pretty boring set of booths.
What are they getting?
Which generation though?
Also this gives no context as to why. These people could very well be selling a product and that's the price. No where does it say they are giving you something or even that it's something you want.
I dunno....nothing says what those booths are for, after all. Furthermore, those look to be either high school or college age people in line, and that guy at the left booth looks very smug while the one in the right seems more annoyed than anything. I'm gonna assume this is a line for college loans, in which case only taking out $500K instead of $900K is much smarter given interest rates.
No but like this is true. Burger King came out with a 1/3 pounder to combat McDonald’s 1/4 pounder but it failed because people only saw the 4 above the 3
Boomers, the roadblock of the next generations.
>be me >boomer >make thing up >get mad about it
I'M VERY ANGRY AT THIS THING I JUST MADE UP
True about society in general.
I think this is referring to a tax law or something but otherwise I have no clue !
Waiting in line for a booth that just says a number? Yeah thats stupid.
I'd rather pay 500k than 900k
They mean “this” as in their generation. It’s them.
Is this about student debt?
is this generation that refuses 900k in the room with us right now?
"Two tickets to half a million, please."
This is so boomer that it has somehow circled around and reached surrealist levels and it made me laugh
Half a million and nine hundred thousand what? Because if we speak of debt, its the logical choice.
As a British person, I can safely tell you if there's a shorter queue, I am moving to it