The A&W Third Pounder Failed Because People Didn’t Understand Fractions (2024)

The A&W Third Pounder was released in the 1980s to compete with McDonald’s quarter pounder, but the public’s inability to understand fractions led to its untimely failure.

I’ll admit that math is not my strong suit, but even as a stupid idiot kid I knew the difference between fractions. Apparently, this wasn’t the case for A&W, and the public’s lack of understanding fractions led to the demise of one of their products.

I love A&W; I think it is one of the best choices if you’re going for fast food. McDonald’s — to me — is honestly one of the last choices I would make with so many good fast food options out there.

But there is no touching McDonald’s as a worldwide fast-food powerhouse. Along with the Big Mac, the quarter pounder may be the most famous — and popular — fast food item ever. It certainly is when it comes to hamburgers.

So with McDonald’s dominating the burger market for so long — and the quarter pounder dominating sales — A&W would try to take a stab at competing with them. This leads to a pretty monumental failure that had nothing to do with A&W but the public’s inability to do math.

Let’s take a look at this entire story but start with McDonald’s.

The first thing to keep in mind here is that a quarter pounder is the weight of the hamburger patty before they cook it. It reduces in size, so you were never really getting what you were paying for.

The quarter pounder goes all the way back to 1971 and, like many other McDonald’s staple items, was thought up by a franchise owner. Al Bernardin had once worked in product development for McDonald’s but then went on to own a few locations of his own.

He was constantly looking to improve on the menu and wondering what other options they could offer that the customers would want. Or more to the point; what items customers didn’t even know they wanted that McDonald’s could offer. One issue he saw was that their burgers didn’t have a very good “meat to bun” ratio, as a McDonald’s hamburger…