Ask A&W
Edit: It will never cease to make me laugh that I get more genuinely serious discussion comments on my meme posts in /c/Memes than anywhere else. I'm not hating, I love it.
Edit 2: Chicago-Style deep dish pizza isn't pizza go fuck yourself
You could also just have 2 regular sized ones or stop being such a fat ass.
The A&W thing is more about Americans sucking ass at math than the difference between a wider or taller burger.
They had a 1/3lb burger and dipshits thought the 1/4lb was bigger because they don't understand fractions.
This is a dumb response. Wider is easier to fit in your mouth and doesnt fall apart. Taller is just a mess and challenge to eat
TLDR: it's not a volume issue, its a distribution
That is the point of the meme.
It's a reference to the third-pound burger, and how consumers thought 1/3 was less than 1/4.
Exactly. Where I used to work there was a greasy cafe type place around the corner and the baps got wider the more stuff you ordered. If you ordered the Full Monty the burger bap was wider than my head. MY HEAD.
You're damn right I would order it every time I went in. It was glorious...and very unhealthy, but also glorious.
Thanks to pizza, even Americans are familiar with the concept of wide
But how many people know that a pizza x times wider is x² times more pizza?
Except in Chicago, cause you know.... Deep dish.
But wider = more taste surface. See smash burgers. Taller is just... more burger to toppings ratio. Diminishing returns, imo.
Unless taller adds additional burgers to the burger. Got this place in my town, they serve their burgers with 2 150g patties. Great stuff!
So the ideal burger is basically the size and shape of a pancake.
A quesadilla.
Until it ends up the thickness of a piece of paper like the Whopper.
Nah. If you put two plates in front of me and one had a regular burger on it and the other had a burger that was as wide as the plate itself, I'd pick the one that most accurately reflects how much I hate myself at that moment.
I’d eat em both
Schlotzky's proved this out decades ago.
At a certain point you have to cut the burger like a pizza though
But you dont have to dislocate your jaw ro eat it :)
Mmmh, pirger.
In my boyfriend's hometown they used to have this restaurant that served this thing called a hubcap burger
And it was indeed, wide enough to be the hubcap of a car, while being basically flat.
There was a Hubcap Grill in Houston that had the best burger in a city that has a lot of great burgers.
They say they named it that because of a method of cooking a burger on a skillet, where you place a metal plate over the beef as it cooks to reduce splattering. The joke was that the burgers were so big that they needed to use a hubcap instead of a plate. And it was pretty close to true. Those burgers were massive and incredible.
They still have a few locations, including one in Hobby airport. But the original, which was a hole in the wall in downtown Houston, was the best.
Heuristics are real things deserving of both respect and fear.
AKA people are idiots.
Never forget that the 1/3 pounder failed because people were too dumb to realize that 1/3 is bigger than 1/4…
AKA Volumes are unintuitive. Always get your martinis filled to the brim. https://youtu.be/Mkn3PzdaByY
Broke: Intuitive responses may not be accurate and experimental experience is necessary to enjoy a fuller understanding of the world
Woke: People are idiots
Bespoke: Andrew Tate Voice
A 1995 experiment found that 50% of undergraduate males and 25% of females performed "very well" on the task and 20% of males and 35% of females performed "poorly".
followed by a series of extremely misogynist noises
Food for thought: a sufficiently tall and narrow burger ain't a burger anymore, when it's roughly spherical rather than roughly cylindrical it's also not a burger and if it's large and brick-like it's yet something else.
So burger is a geometrically bound dish definition.
a sufficiently tall and narrow burger ain’t a burger anymore
It's a hotdog.
Meatloaf and meatballs have things like egg and breadcrumbs mixed in, and don’t tend to come on buns.
People who put such things in their hamburger patties are eating meatloaf sandwiches, not hamburgers.
Hah! Joke's on you: you haven't seen my cooking!
It’s in comparison, the plate you’re eating off of is the closest thing to compare it to so covering more of it makes it seem bigger
This is why buffets use small plates
I disagree with the glasses part as counterargument. Pizzas are sold by diameter in places that offer large and small - some even do medium. I also believe it would be nicer to have wider burgers instead of taller
Well that only works because pizza is a 2 dimensional food
Counterpoint - pizzas are sold by diameter, but pretty much everyone I know underestimates how diameter corresponds to actual pizza size and think a 16" pizza is twice as big as an 8" pizza instead of four times as big, which it actually is. Meanwhile, a burger patty that is twice as big as another one is actually twice as tall, while one that is wider is only about ~41% wider. Vertical dimension is more intuitive for the overall mass difference.
Who would even eat the taller pizza? I'd find it disgusting. I'm not saying anything about the burger.
Yeah but A&W tried numbers. A purely vibes based experiment with burger width vs height may prove differently.
But if it is wider it cooks through more. A nice thick patty gives me a nice tasty medium rare burger that soaks the bun with burger juice.
Buns and patties would have to come in two different sizes for wide and regular burgers, and it’s probably more economical for restaurants to make them all in one standard size.
Hers a wild idea: What if the restaurant made their own food, shaped exactly how they wanted it, instead of buying premade buns and patties?
Actually worked in a fast food place, and we had three sizes iirc. Patties and Buns.
square 🔲 ?
The issue is toppings still have to go up. It's not like you can do a burger with the works and have zones of flavor. "Ooh this was the lettuce bite! I hope I get the pickle next!"
So the more you put on your burger the taller it gets.
There's also been an upsetting trend of smash burgers taking over every fucking restaurant. Ridiculously wide and flat patties that have a lot of flavor but it feels like you're eating a fried piece of cheese rather than a good burger.
Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy a good smash burger. It definitely has it's place. I used to make them but found that just making a chopped cheese was easier and honestly a little better.
But a fat, juicy, pink all the way through and almost red in the middle burger that squirts when you bite it will always be the king of my grill. And generally if I'm going to go get a burger somewhere, that's what I'm actually craving. This burgers must be taller. If you make that kind of patty too wide you either need to add a binder to keep it together, which kinda ruins the texture, or you'll need a really wide spatula to flip it and honestly some of them are still going to fall apart on you. Just the nature of the beast.
There's also been an upsetting trend of smash burgers taking over every fucking restaurant. Ridiculously wide and flat patties that have a lot of flavor but it feels like you're eating a fried piece of cheese rather than a good burger.
If your smash burger is thin then they're not doing it right
Been smash cooking burgers since I was 8 (fuck me 21 years?! MY BURGER COOKING CAN DRINK?!) and never had a thin burger as a result
A burger should have bun, meat, cheese, dressing and maybe bacon...Everything else is a side dish that has no business inside the burger.
I mean, humans completely suck at evaluating vertical distances, thinking that taller = more is just further evidence, I'd say
A&W tried something like this. Sold a 1/3 pound burger because its bigger than the popular Quarter Pounder sold by its competition, larger than a Whopper even. It undersold and when people were asked why; it turns out people think 1/3 is less than 1/4. By the numbers, here.
Should have sold a 1/5 pound burger then lol
Thus the title <3
Ya, made me member. Wasnt sure if the story was well known enough.
Tbf any variation of "one third of a pound" is a shit name, so all this proves is that they failed to market the product.
The real answer is likely that extra wide buns are not available from suppliers, and nowhere bakes their own bread these days. For the chains that have their own off-site bakeries and supply chains, the majority of consumers probably don't want a much bigger burger, and those that do have big enough mouths to fit extra tall burgers, or buy 2 burgers which are easier to eat. I know if I'm extra hungry I'll grab 2 cheeseburgers, but most of the time 1 plus the mandatory chips is enough childhood nostalgia junk for me. I wouldn't care about a 50% wider cheeseburger.
Murica!
To be fair, I can't think of a good name for a 3rd of a pound. "Thrice Slice" looks good, but is cumbersome to pronounce, and it sounds like a pizza.
Its amazing what a defunded education system can produce honestly.
Ok I’ve always hated this “advertising study”. A&W is a small fish in a big pond. Expecting their shitty third pounder to outsell a core McDonalds menu item in its prime is a Herculean task. Americans do suck at math but maybe your burger sucked a bit more.
Well, yes, but also McDonald's did it to themselves too. About 20 years ago when I worked there (holy shit I just realized it was 20 years ago), they had the Angus 1/3 pounders. They flopped hard. Exact same reasoning, both from their corporate offices and me anecdotally, people are fucking stupid. They really thought they were getting ripped off because the quarter pounder was more meat than the 1/3 pound Angus burger according to them. I, tiny teenage me tried explaining it to them, to no avail. Fucking morons.
You want to lose hope for the human race, work in a service industry
I mean it worked for subway. Until they started skimping
Their success came from it being specifically longer. It's much harder to visualise a bigger surface area, like how a 10 inch pizza is bigger than two 7 inch pizzas. Subway on the other hand only stretches it in one axis, so the number goes up faster.
I don't want long burgers, although I don't know why. Big fan of the circle.
Roy's once had the bodacious bacon cheeseburger. It was pretty lit.
It was 1/3 of a pound and elongated.
The form factor is not bad it's like the original chicken sandwich from Burger King.
Some poboy shops here sell a long burger. My gym buddy used to regularly eat the 8 patty footlong double. Must have been a pound of meat on it, never mind the cheese and other toppings.
It's easy, just call it something different, like a chopped cheese.
Size factors are tricky and the issue with fractional weights. I say we make wider Burger circles and number then in onces in the USA and grammes in the rest of the world. I want my 200 Burger and my 400 Burger wide.
The fundamental problem is that burgers are a stack.
So what your saying is we need a better burger backend dev?
True, a burger queue might be more advantageous.
B-Tree burgers.
I prefer my burgers as red black trees
Just go snake mode and unhinge your jaw.
counterpoint: wattaburger in texas is very popular
Yesss, taller burgers are anything but nice.
I mean, I can't argue with the little girl though, I like that tall thin glass better as well.
Add a fun straw and some decorations and I'm all in.
The tall, thin one would be better for champagne.
So the invisible hand of the market has spoken, I see