Meant To Rival The Quarter Pounder, This Competitor's Burger Flopped — Because, Math

Burger weight is big business, as it turns out, though sometimes things need to be spelled out for consumers. In the 1970s, McDonald's introduced its Quarter Pounder, a burger featuring a 4-ounce patty. Aside from the Big Mac, it may be the best known burger out there. It doesn't feature a special sauce or the two-layer styling of the Big Mac, but the Quarter Pounder is made from never-frozen beef and its patty is more than twice as large as the standard McDonald's burger — those weigh in at just 1.6 ounces each, or a tenth of a pound.

The advertising for the Quarter Pounder in the 1970s emphasized that there was no place else to get one, but a competing fast food chain clearly took that personally and sought to one-up McDonald's by offering an even larger third-pound burger at the same price. Unfortunately for A&W, would-be customers just couldn't wrap their heads around those fractions. Despite the fact that A&W's Third-of-a-Pound Burger, as it was called, featured a patty of about 5.33 ounces, while the McDonald's offering was just 4 ounces, the McDonald's burger continued to dominate.

In order to understand the root of the problem, A&W held focus groups. The company had run an advertising campaign to make clear that their burger was larger and less expensive by weight than the McDonald's alternative, and the tests even found that customers preferred the taste of the Third-of-a-Pound Burger as well. The problem was painfully simple: More than half of the individuals surveyed believed that ⅓ was smaller than ¼.

It is an unfortunate mark on the state of education that individuals were so baffled by the fractions attached to those two burgers that they couldn't properly assess the relative sizes. American cooking measurements can be confusing, we'll give you that. A tablespoon is half an ounce but for some reason it's three teaspoons to a tablespoon, meaning, of course, that there are 48 teaspoons in a cup — or 768 to a gallon. But to understand these burgers you didn't need to get into the realm of teaspoons and pints, you didn't even need to know that there are 16 ounces to a pound, all you needed to know was how basic fractions work.

At the time, the Third-of-a-Pound Burger failing due to a missing understanding of simple arithmetic was surely a disappointment for A&W. A few decades down the road, however, the chain found an excellent way to embrace that failure and launch what could be funniest burger ever made. In 2021, A&W released its 3/9 lb. Burger. The patty, of course, is the exact same size as that original flop — three ninths is equal to one third, for those who don't remember their fractions too well — but with numbers that big, there's no way anyone could question its superiority to a measly Quarter Pounder. At this point, McDonald's is likely too much of a global juggernaut to be much affected by such competition — there are fewer than 900 A&W restaurants compared to McDonald's 40,000-plus — but it is a hilarious way to bring that old story back to the limelight.