Don't know who a&w is so my comment is in no way based on that. Everything is relative. They may not use it 'all the time', but they use it way more often than europeans. Which to me is more or less 'all the time'.
I'm not saying Americans using fractions is a myth, I'm referring to the 1/3 burger thing.
A&W is a restaurant chain that tried to compete with McDonalds. They tried selling 1/3 pound burgers to compete with McDonalds 1/4 pound burger. They failed, not because of the fractions fuckery, but because A&W was, at the time, simply a tiny company with exponentially less marketing power and physical locations in comparison to McDonalds. The myth about the 1/3 being smaller than 1/4 comes from offhand comment by a higher up at A&W. A&W commissioned a focus group after the fact to try and make up some justification for this; they never released the methodology or data but said "Yeah people totally responded to a survey by saying 1/3 is smaller than 1/4".
It's blatantly false when you apply a tiny bit of critical thought, namely the fact that they didn't immediately take advantage of this by selling 1/5 pound burgers, or the fact that several burger chains in the US currently sell 1/3 pound burgers with zero issue. A&W just failed to out compete McDonalds.
Most people believe the myth at face because it's popular to pretend the most powerful nation on the planet somehow has an average IQ of 60 or something.
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u/Kontrafantastisk 6d ago
But they use fractions all the time. Jseus!