Do Americans need bigger burgers?
this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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Fair question. ☝️
Let's just pretend that metric doesn't have fractions.
Not that they don't exist, but in my experience I have never seen them used, if something is, say, 1/2 liter you see it written as 50cl...
For burgers, I have seen
- 150gr
- 250gr
- 2 x 150gr
- 500gr
- 1kg
But maybe it's only my experience and in other parts of Europe it's different
1/2 liter is usually marked as 0,5 liter.
? No it isn't
It depends on the country.
There is also a metric pound but honestly people don't use it.
I've just had a radical idea to solve obesity in America
1/3 equals 1/4 because in both cases you have 1.
I'm gonna move the goal posts here and say smaller burgers are inherently better. I don't want to chew on a giant pile of ground beef.
You must love the smashburger trend
Absolutely. Throw on some cheddar or muenster and drizzle some hot bbq, we're in business.
Is that like a crab cake as a burger? What's up with the giant chunks of cucumber? That sweet and sour sauce running down it is gonna make that so messy and the bun is gonna be sliding off in both sides and soaked through.
Christ that is more cursed a burger than an A&W burger could ever be.
Yeah, if this is the burger they introduced then I think we know why it failed.
It was more because there weren’t many A&Ws around. Closest to me was over an hour away.
This is so dumb
the whole meme is just euro cope
I see this repeated all the time and I'm sure there's some truth to it, but A&W burgers are also disgusting and more expensive than their competitors. So there's that.
No, Americans could have had bigger burgers if they weren't stupid.
Should have sold it as a 2/6ths burger.
The maths teachers wouldn't have been happy, but apparently the buyers would have.
"Woah, 2/6 is waayyyy bigger than 1/4, not like that teensy 1/3 burger they used to have"
Maybe the problem is that nasty pointy cucumber on the bottom of it. Wait, it's that a veggie burger? Who the hell puts pointy cucumber on a veggie burger?
[VINCENT]
And you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?
[JULES]
They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?
[VINCENT]
No, they don't have fractions, they wouldn't know what the fuck a Quarter is.
[JULES]
Then what do they call it?
[VINCENT]
They call it Royale with Cheese.
Recently it occurred to me that in the US we have 25¢ coins but $20 bills. It never bothered me before but it's really odd. Especially when many other countries have 20"¢" coins.
No, they don't have fractions, they wouldn't know what the fuck a Quarter is.
"No they have the metric system, they don't know what the fuck a quarter pounder is"
Fractions aren't imperial, fractions are fractions, everyone has them. It's the 'pound' that's imperial and normal people don't use.
How could OP have transcribed the movie clip so wrong, but still made an absurdist joke? Thanks for clearing it up.
I've been a victim of Poe's Law, but there has to be some threshold where it's not ambiguous.
#woosh
There are three countries using the ass backwards Imperial measurement system. USA, Liberia and Myanmar...WTF!?!?
I hear this type of take often but I'm skeptical that it happened (originally heard it as McDonald's doing it, not A&W) and I'm skeptical that it's the reason it failed.
You could test this by setting up a food stall that sells something like this as a control.
- 6 pc for $5
- 9 pc for $5
- 12 pc for $9
Then do something similar with the burgers. See how many people inherently want more for the same price. Then switch it up so the middle one is cheaper. Switch the ordering of the lists as well. Etc.
Do I think some people just don't understand fractions and think third is less? Sure. But I think there are too many variables to say that's it alone. If someone is that bad with math, it's gonna matter if you write it as ½ ⅓ ¼ or half third quarter. Then it's gonna matter if they ask what the ⅓ means versus if the cashier asks if they want "half, third, or quarter".
All that to say, I think there are definitely some people who don't inherently want more food, even if it's the same price (and maybe even if it's cheaper) and I'm not sure how many people like that there are versus people who are bad at the math aspect. Throw in stuff about how the menu is presented and I just don't see how we can really come to this conclusion.
Shout out to the time my buddy realized it was 1¢ cheaper to get two 6 of meals than one 12 pc meal. (Basically 6 of was like $5.99 and 12 pc was like $11.99 or whatever.)
I mean, I don't know why you'd be skeptical.
A&W has a write up about it https://www.awrestaurants.com/blog/memories-history/the-truth-about-aws-third-pound-burger-and-the-major-math-mix-up/
And Snope's did an article https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/06/17/third-pound-burger-fractions/
There's plenty of blunders like this. Like when JCPenny's just gave great prices and sales dropped because if something is $50, that's too much. But 75% off from $200, well, that's a deal! We know more about the JCPenny one, because it happened in 2012 and not 1980-something
It's not like I'm gonna do research before making every comment. I was skeptical because it sounds far fetched.
metric system
Is this one of those intentionally-obviously-wrong comments designed to encourage people to comment on the meme?
Worked didn't it?
TIL fractions don't exist in the metric system.
We wouldn't normally say "I'd like a 18/100 kilogram burger"...
Yup for us its 250g vs 333g burgers. Or 0.25 vs 0.33kg
Eh that's regional still, like in dutch we've changed the meaning of old imperial words to be equal to metric quantities, though probably used more common by older people. So 1 ons (ounce) = 100g and a pond (pound) is half a kg. But this is mostly used at a butcher. For other stuff we mostly just use the metric nomenclature.
especially in the context of foodstuffs the decagramm (or just deka in common language) is getting used in Austria, don't know if it's the same in germany, so it would be a 25 deka burger
MORE DEKA!!!
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Had they adopted the metric system
Or at least had an education system capable of teaching basic maths
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