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.
That is it for today! Take care and have a great one! 💞
Seclusion 101 with AnneMarie 