October 22nd – Fractions

by annemariedemyen, posted in News & Views - October 2021

Today’s news story was just too good to pass up. 😲 Sometime in the 1980’s, fast-food chain A&W introduced a 1/3 Pounder to compete with the McDonald’s 1/4 Pounder. Selling it at the same price as McDonald’s was selling their smaller burger, they thought it should be a sure winner! It was not.

Decades later, they decided to figure out where they had gone wrong with their genius marketing promotion. They used focus groups to find the answer to their dilemna. The focus groups got right to the heart of the problem. 50% of the geniuses in their focus groups believed A & W was ripping them off because they thought 1/4 pound was larger than 1/3 pound. Seriously?

If focus groups are an accurate representation of the general population, we are in some trouble.

In all of my sixty-six years (two thirds of a century there abouts), I have run across one person who had zero concept of fractions. He honestly had no idea how to cut a pie in half or how far to go if I told him that a certain shop was half a block away. He just could not wrap his head around fractions.

The rest of the people I have know, could tell the difference between 1/2 , 1/4, and 1/3 by the time they were three. Some struggled with adding 3/16ths to 5/32nds, but how often does that come up outside of the construction industry?

I could possibly understand if these focus groups were twenty year olds from Canada (where we use the metric system a good part of the time), but these were Americans. They must have been taught fractions in school. What is the deal?

Anyway, to turn this promotion debacle around, A&W has decided to offer a limited time 3/9 Pound Burger. If sold out, one can buy a 2/6 Pound Burger for the same time.

I may be wrong, but I think that half of their customers may flock to Burger King to avoid the math madness.

Prim & Maddy – long before the math controversy made headlines 💞

That is it for today! Take care and have a great one! 💞

26 thoughts on “October 22nd – Fractions”

  3. Sadly I know more than one person who would make the 1/3rd mistake off the top. Sure you can figure it out if you are concentrating on a test. But it is an optical illusion. Four is bigger than three.

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  4. I am sure you are right but it does seem sad to me. I have known people with literacy issues and it was such a daily struggle for them. I never realized that there were so many who had the same issue with basic math.

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  5. We learned fractions in school in the 1970s, I knew exactly what you are talking about. Our publikk skrewel syssteim down here is a farce! We were even taught how to write a check properly back then. Today, they teach kids about a lie called global warming, about sex education, and how to love Joe Biden as your Lord. Any wonder why AmeriKa is sliding into the toilet?

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  6. I know they started a reading system here in the early 80’s that was just a joke. I knew then that there was no way it work. Two decades later it was still a disaster, they had illiterate kids graduating out of public schools, and they announced that they had to keep using it because it had been developed by a recognized top educator from the States. They are probably still using the same garbage now. 🤦‍♀️

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  10. I don’t know how many drivers around here think they are better. They are always running into each other. I know a lot of people find Algebra difficult (myself included). I just never realized that math illiteracy was such an issue.

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  11. What a great promotion! But I would think that the reason the burgers did not sell as well had to be because of the thousand Island dressing. 🙂

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  13. I love A & W but I find all of their burgers are a lot greasier than other fast food places so I feel stuffed forever. I hadn’t noticed they uses thousand island dressing. Burger King uses a lot of condiments (which I am not a fan of).

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  18. Two of our major home grown supermarkets are advertising that a large number of their products are now price matched with the much cheaper Aldi. It seems to me that will only benefit Aldi – why wouldn’t customers flock there? Lovely photo.

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  19. Sounds right to me! we do not have Aldi or a believe it was Tesco that you mentioned before We get price matching here but I don’t think they specifically mention who they are matching. Thank you!

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  20. Here it is not just fractions they don’t understand. Without a register that tells them how much change to give you they would not know. Some even get mixed up and don’t count the change right. I loved the A&W root beer and the floats where I lived in my younger days. I have never seen one where I live now. Another interesting subject you came up with.

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  21. So true about counting change. My Dad had a grade 2 education (in French). He taught me how to count back change to customers when I was five. He could also walk around a building, figure out exactly what he needed for material and labour and decide what he needed to charge to stucco a building. He never went over or under on his estimate. It was amazing. 👍

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  22. Aldi and Lidl are two German outlets who have taken UK by storm. They are very inexpensive and their quality is superb. I am wearing a linen shirt from Lidl which fits perfectly and cost £7. Tesco is one of the big ones advertising price matching.

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