Meant To Rival The Quarter Pounder, This Competitor’s Burger Flopped — Because, Math
Burger weight is big business, but sometimes things need to be explained for consumers. In the 1970s, McDonald’s introduced the Quarter Pounder, a burger with a 4-ounce patty. It may be the most well-known burger other than the Big Mac. It doesn’t have a special sauce or the two-layered style of the Big Mac, but the Quarter Pounder is made with beef that’s never been frozen, and its patty is more than twice the size of a standard McDonald’s burger — they weigh just 1.6 ounces each, or one-tenth of a pound.
Advertising for the Quarter Pounder in the 1970s emphasized that there was nowhere else to get the product, but a rival fast food chain clearly took this personally and tried to one-up McDonald’s by offering an even larger one-pound burger for the same price. Unfortunately for A&W, potential customers failed to grasp these parts. A&W’s Third Pound Burger has a patty of approximately 5.33 ounces, while McDonald’s burger continues to dominate, although McDonald’s offering is only 4 ounces.
To understand the root of the problem, A&W held focus groups. The company had run an ad campaign to make it clear that its burgers were larger and cheaper by weight than the McDonald’s alternative, and tests even revealed that customers preferred the taste of the Three to the Pound Burger, too. The problem was painfully simple: More than half of those surveyed believed that ⅓ was less than ¼.
Read more: We Tried and Ranked Every McDonald’s Burger
Baking measurements can be tricky
Exterior photo of A&W fast food restaurant – Paulmckinnon/Getty Images
It is an unfortunate sign of educational attainment that individuals are so bewildered by the fractions contained in these two hamburgers that they cannot accurately assess their relative sizes. American baking measurements can be confusing, we’ll give you that. A tablespoon is half an ounce, but for some reason a tablespoon equals three teaspoons, which of course means there are 48 teaspoons in a cup or 768 teaspoons in a gallon. But you didn’t need to get into teaspoon and pint territory to understand these burgers, you didn’t even need to know that a pound is 16 ounces, all you needed to know was how basic fractions work.
At the time, it was certainly a disappointment for A&W that the Pound’s Three Burgers failed due to an incomplete understanding of simple arithmetic. But a few decades later, the chain found the perfect way to embrace that failure and introduce the funniest burger ever made. A&W in 2021 3/9 lb. He launched his burger. The patty is, of course, exactly the same size as the original flop—three-ninths equals one-third, for those who don’t remember fractions very well—but with numbers this large, there’s no way anyone could question its superiority over a weak Quarter Pounder. At this point, McDonald’s probably seems like too much of a global juggernaut to be affected much by this kind of competition — there are fewer than 900 A&W restaurants compared to McDonald’s more than 40,000 — but it’s a funny way of bringing the old story back to light.
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