It’s not like Americans need bigger food.
“try our new 113g burger”
Yes, I’ve literally seen baked goods advertised like that. One bakery in my town is proud of its bigger-than-average pretzels and puts the weight right there on the ad posters.
The famous 113 grammer with cheese
We can’t afford bigger burgers now anyway, the price of beef is insane. And when bigger burgers are desired, they’ll sell “double quarter pounders”. Not that Americans generally need bigger burgers anyway, but that’s a different topic.
the price of beef is insane
Good
Do Americans need bigger burgers?
Yes
Fair question. ☝️
Carl’s Jr. did the same thing. The 1/3 pound was perfect. Two 1/4 patties are too much, one 1/4 patty is too little.
I miss the Carl’s Jr. 1/3 pound burger.
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?
Pretty sure fractions are pure math & not metric or imperial.
Americans do be dumb AF, though.
Yes and no. Imperial measurements that are not integers are displayed in fractions. Hence quarterpounders and thirpounders. In metrics, fractions are rarely used. Because the scales are more granular and because non-integers are usually displayed in decimals.
People thinking a third-pound-burger being smaller than a quarterpounder could not have happened with metrics, because, well, look at the title.
Fractions are more accurate. You can’t display 1/3 as a decimal. Americans are dumb, but this isn’t an imperial versus metric thing.
Your accuracy goes out of the window when you are actually measuring things though. The error is as significant as rounding 1/3 to 0.33
Not rounding. Mathematically, 0.(3) (repeating) is the exact same as 1/3
I know that. But practically, if you are trying to measure 1/3 of an arbitrary distance, or 1/3 of an arbitrary weight, you are not going to be able to hit the exact, precise measurement using normal household or kitchen tools. Therefore your origin assertion that 1/3 as a fraction is more accurate than decimal is meaningless, as you can’t actually utilise that extra precision.
1/3 = 0.(3) (digits in parenthesis indicate repeating)
2/3 = 0.(6)
3/3 = 0.(9) which is equal to 1 btw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999…
Despite common misconceptions, 0.999… is not “almost exactly 1” or “very, very nearly but not quite 1”; rather, “0.999…” and “1” represent exactly the same number.
I’m from a country where we use metric and can’t think of anything that would normally be displayed as a fraction. Sure we know what half and third are, but they’re not used officially for anything
You’ve never had to halve a recipe before? Which is easier to do in your head, half of 78.862 milliliters or half of 1/3 cup?
No recipe lists 78.862 mm of anything.
A recipe with metric units will default to gram amounts that are divisible by ten and thus infinitely easier to halve than “5/8 of your grandmother’s good cake spoon” or any such folksy nonsense.
I would round it to 40ml. I have no idea how much 1/6th of a cup would be. Most of my cups are different sizes too so I wouldn’t know which on to trust. Also they are oddly shaped and not transparent making it a real challenge all and all.
I find it funny how people are very confidently incorrect here. Best example I can think of is to compare an imperial and metric drill bit set
Imperial measurements that are not integers are displayed in fractions.
Often, they’re not: look at packaging labels especially in grocery stores. Engineers use decimals regardless of unit.
Weight scales in the US don’t mark 1⁄3.
Quarter & third likely show up for verbal ease/brevity of naming: saying 250 grams is a bit of mouthful & unlikely for naming anything. I suspect if Americans used metric, they might still use fractions to refer to burgers by weight/mass in kg (like drugs!).
In metrics, fractions are rarely used.
Also convention. Nothing prevents 1⁄3 kg, 1⁄4 kg, and I’d expect to see 1⁄3 kg more often than 0.3̅ kg if rounding were avoided.
In metric, Americans still would get this wrong, because they don’t understand fractions despite using them. Or are you suggesting everyone would get the order of 1⁄3 kg & 1⁄4 kg wrong?
Obviously 1/3 vs 1/4 is the same distinction regardless of unit. But part of the whole idea of metric is avoiding dealing with fractions in lieu of decimals. It’s inherently less fraction-heavy.
Americans rarely see 1/3. We typically only use binary fractions: halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths. Occasionally, 32nds. Smaller than that, we use decimal.
Are Europeans afraid of fractions or something? It’s way quicker to mentally add 9/16 and 3/8 compared to 0.5625 and 0.3750…
Like I get that metric is better but “metric is when no fractions” make 0/1 sense.
Edit - tfw you get ratiod by “9+6 is hard” in a thread about people not understanding basic arithmetic
I’m a lifelong American and neither of these are easy, but the decimals are much more like real numbers to me.
I encounter decimal points in my day to day interactions with numbers. Not so with fractions.
I will start learning fractions when restaurants put them in their prices.
“That will be $4 and 3/4,” said no one ever, thank gob.
xD
Sounds to me like they missed the opportunity to sell a 1/5 burger for more instead.
Fifthy pounder on the way
The filthy pounder with cheese. Sounds like a good movie.
A regular McDonald’s hamburger is 1/10, I think people would have figured it out at that point.
I’ve just had a radical idea to solve obesity in America
“Uh a 151.197 grammer with cheese.”
No one went to A&W for burgers back then, footlong chili dog and root beer.
This, exactly.
Anyone repeating this 1/4 vs 1/3 bullshit never had one of their 1/3lb burgers. They were fucking terrible. Sysco prison-grade burger patties, drowned in store-brand ketchup with a thin slice of “American”-flavored yellow #5.
Absolute worst burger I’ve ever had.
Growing up, A&W was for chili dogs and a big glass mug of rootbeer. Never order anything else; its always a fat sack of disappointment.
That must have been a US thing. A&W in Canada has had excellent Teen burgers for decades.
A&W now is pretty damn good in the US. As a Wisconsinite, their cheese curds are better than Culvers and it’s not even close.
The hell is a “teen burger”? Canadians are eating the underaged!!
I miss it. We’d get footlongs and a gallon of root beer then go to the park across from it. I wonder if it’s still there.
But that can’t be right! I have it on good authority that A&W stands for Amburgers and Woot beer!
The funny thing is McDonald’s also tried 1/3 lb burgers later on, and also failed.
It’s probably also why they don’t advertise a Big Mac is 1/5 pound of beef, because it would make the Quarter pounder lose interest I assume.
They are actually 1/10 lol. I think that’s why, they don’t want ppl to know how tiny those patties are. I add two patties to bring it up to 4 total at 4/10 lb, puts it 1 patty shy of a double quarter pounder.
The patties are 1/10th, yeah. I meant there are 2 of them on the sandwich. Your math checks out, as you added 2 to get to 2/5ths.
1/3 equals 1/4 because in both cases you have 1.
TIL fractions don’t exist in the metric system.
well they do, but since it’s metric it’s always 1/10 1/100 … and they have their own name so no math needed
Fractions still work the same way. The thing is Americans would think the 1/100 is bigger than 1/2, because 100>2. Doesn’t matter what unit you start with
Edit: I see what you’re saying with the names. But do you think the average american knows that a quarter pounder is less than a third pounder?
I don’t think they’re significantly stupider than anywhere else. I don’t know if there even are statistics on that, I should probably check. Plenty of people are terrible at math over here in Europe too.
The average American literally works in random-ass fractions all the time and doesn’t rely on everything being base ten.
I really want to believe that, as an American. I really, really do. How would a legitimate way of testing that go? There’s no feasible way to test EVERYBODY, so you’d have to consult the statistics people, who I am not.
I was about to start looking into median ages and education rates and literacy, but I really don’t care that much about this as I lay in bed and am about to go to sleep, so I asked chatgpt, which then gave me a long answer with this at the end:
Yes, the average American probably knows that 1/3 is greater than 1/4, but a noticeable percentage—especially among adults with lower educational attainment or math anxiety—may hesitate or answer incorrectly, especially outside of a clear, direct question.
And my intuition tells me this is likely right on.
one way to test it is if a major corporation active all over the country introduces a product with a fraction in the name, meant as a competitor to another product with a smaller fraction. the sales numbers would roughly reflect the result.
Mmmmm… Doubt.
I grew up with a mcds and an a&w nearby in the 90s and 00s. A&W is kinda like Wendy’s: their food just kinda sucks. I don’t look at value that closely unless all other things are equal. So saying “nobody bought our burger because they all can’t read numbers” is kind’ve a petulant behavior unless it’s proven imo… it’s like making excuses for your failures.
People just LIKE McDonald’s. And and brand loyalty is real.
People just LIKE McDonald’s
…why?
Here in Japan, it’s one of the few restaurants that’s often open at 4 AM and has free wifi and phone charging, and is the same across the country. Kinda like wafflehouse, I rarely eat there, but it’s nice as a last resort.
The food is still mid, and kinda expensive at 2/3 or less the cost in the US.
People all over the world like McDonald’s for different reasons. That’s not a serious question.
Can this not be Reddit? Please? Reddit culture sucked and I left there for good reason. It doesn’t have to be funny or clever anymore. It’s just real people having real discussion, intelligently, on a real level, yeah?
Most Americans are educated, but it’s a really diverse country with lots of issues. There are plenty of people in countries that use metric that don’t even understand metric or fractions, too, as most people are the exact goddamn same, especially now with the internet. A&W burgers were a specific type and I don’t remember them being very good. I think that’s why they failed, not because people couldn’t maximize the value. If anything, I think it was a death spiral in a company known for putting soft serve and soda together, not 1/12th of a pound of shitty beef.
They probably weren’t making much money, had to cut back, shitty employees cutting quality because they don’t care and bad leadership, and people stopped going even more, and then leadership blamed literacy instead of their own repeated fuckups and that nobody really liked them anymore.
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
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!!!
And these signs could have used ounces instead. But they didn’t. We had other units available. The units weren’t the issue
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.
metric system
Is this one of those intentionally-obviously-wrong comments designed to encourage people to comment on the meme?
Worked didn’t it?
