this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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Except it's not true. That was just the excuse A&W made when going bankrupt. No one else had problems selling 1/3lb burgers in the US.
It was literally reported in newspapers at the time, angry people posting in the opinions section about how A&W was 'ripping people off'
And no other existing fast food chain at the time marketed a 1/3 burger.
Source: I am fucking old.
Now can you explain to me why so many people assume your bullshit to be right?
for some reason people love to revisit things like this and find post hoc justifications for dumb fucks to make them look smarter. it happens a lot with elon and TFG too.
but the one timeless example that pisses me off the most is W's "fool me once" flub. every time it's mentioned, so many people come to his defense, adamant that it was on purpose! supposedly he didn't want to have a clip of him saying "shame on me" on camera to be used against him in political ads and whatnot. not like we have tons of evidence that he was a fuckwit before that, and never mind that there's absolutely no evidence for this to be so propagated like it's a fact...
but this is such bs on so many levels that I'm getting angry even right now thinking about it. wow! such marvelous political instincts... he sure didn't end up giving a much worse soudbite that made him look like an absolute buffoon now, did he? what a savant!
no, people can be stupid. but also the american public in general? come on... there's areas in which you can try to save your national pride, math ain't one of them.
Wasn't this proven false long ago? Snopes says it's true. 🤷
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/06/17/third-pound-burger-fractions/
Yeah, I would think so. No other restaurant had problems selling 1/3lb burgers. Braums and Carls Jr sling them by the truckload. Almost all the small family restaurants here sell their burgers by 1/3lb 2/3lb sizes. And I don't exactly live in an area known for it's high intelligence. So I'm calling shenanigans.
Every record that I can find says Carls Jr debut their 1/3 lb thickburger in 2002 and Braum's was founded in the 1980s.
So they were absolutely NOT contemporaries of A&W when they were marketing their 1/3 lb burgers.
I'm not really sure what people like you get from coming here and lying on the internet, but I am so fuckdamn tired of it.
Username checks out.
Edit: the claim in the OP is "1/3lb burger failed in america" nothing to do with the 80's. Lots of places still sell 1/3lb burgers 40 years later.
Video games also failed in America. Some even thought it would never come back into prominence, and I don't recall if it's related but the writer of the Wticher books sold rights for the game in hard cash and not percentage of profit because he thought they'd never make money as a video game.
Failed and such doesn't mean forever. Things can change or changes in advertising/quality control can restore dead markets. Now maybe this means as you said it wasn't American stupidity, but were also talking Americans who supported segregation at one time and by majority now do not. As different people grow up or even if people heard about this and learned to be less dumb, the conditions in which the original failure could have changed, making the statement true at the time.
It did, in the 80s, when A&W tried to sell them. I live a 30m drive from the original A&W, they have newspapers up from that time with the people bitching about it. It's a popular "fun fact" style story and has been since it happened
The practice wasnt successful until the early 2000s, a little after it had become a fun fact that became more and more widely known. I think I even remember seeing an ad for Carl's Jr that played on the fact that A&W had failed where they were succeeding and made some joke about dumb older generations or whatever to appeal to the youth
Then they aren't contemporaries of the time when A&W debut their 1/3 burger NOW ARE THEY?!
I'm not really sure what you and the above asshat's motivation is, do you think that somehow your intellectual dishonesty will make people think Americans are less stupid on average?
Frankly I don't even care and I am so fuckdamn tired of your kind.
Please take a step back. You're getting worked up about a hamburger debate on the Internet.
No I am getting worked up about two people spewing provably wrong bullshit, misleading the entire thread, and getting tons of traction because of it.
We are now reddit 2016 and it's only getting worse by the hour.
You're getting worked up by a hamburger debate on the Internet.
Look at my profile and google EDS (Or IED before they realized how unfortunate the parallels were) and you will see why. It's medical, not fully controllable and I've had it for more than 4 decades. Now feel free to spew all that ableism you've got all pent up.
By now it's already been a meme for a while. That's how these people learned that the ⅓ was bigger than the ¼.
Nah, if you look in any American kitchen, you'll find 1/3 cup and 1/4 cup measuring cups. They may not use them, but everyone has them, and it's painfully obvious that the 1/4 nests inside the 1/3, therefore the 1/3 is bigger. If you want to make mac 'n cheese, you use the 1/4 for the milk, which means you'll take it out of the 1/3 cup.
Americans are so bad at measurements that graduation marks don't work for them.
They need an individual container for each common measurement.
It's absurd.
Lol.
But yes, we do have graduation marks like this one, which would also clearly label the 1/4 cup and 1/3 cup parts. Whichever one you have, it's pretty intuitive that
1/3 > 1/4. I prefer the separate ones since they take up less space so they can go in a drawer instead of the cupboard (and I have 2-3 of each size), but to each their own.Is A&W a good source on why their huge marketing stunt failed?
It was in newspapers, you can literally search it and read scans of it right now.
Even in the 70s there were people who marveled at how stupid the angry idiots who thought 1/3 was less than 1/4 and you can go back and read those articles and see their own words.
Ooh, I wanna read these.
I am having trouble finding scans, though. Do you have any links?
There is already at least one in the thread and I'm not doing free work for you today.
Do you mean... the snopes article?
Okay.
Yup, A&W sucked because their food sucks. They were great when I was a kid (I loved their frosted rootbeer mugs and onion rings), but they started cutting costs or something because I never went back after the early 2000s or so.
I blame it on this stunt where they merged KFC and A&W, both of which suck.