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
Actually worked in a fast food place, and we had three sizes iirc. Patties and Buns.
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.
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?
It's a question of wage costs and consistency. Patties are easy enough but time consuming. Baking a good burger bun is a pretty specific skill as well as time consuming, and requires a lot of space and a good oven.
Unless you've got customers happy to pay $40 for your artisan crafted burgers I don't think it'd work.
square 🔲 ?
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.
I bet the price increase was more than 1/12, though.
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.
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.
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.
Schlotzky's proved this out decades ago.
I’d eat em both
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.
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
See youve got it! There is some import to this, AW was never gonna pull Mcd and Bk #’s but the fact is that their burger undersold at their restaurants and this is the reason they eventually found. Not poor locations, which they were, not poor advertising, which was dismal. AW was well known for burgers and ice cream and may have had a chance if it wasnt run by clown college graduates.
Should have sold a 1/5 pound burger then lol
But wider = more taste surface. See smash burgers. Taller is just... more burger to toppings ratio. Diminishing returns, imo.
Smashburgers are about hijaking the Maillard reaction. Thinner meat means more browning.
Until it ends up the thickness of a piece of paper like the Whopper.
Unless taller adds additional burgers to the burger. Got this place in my town, they serve their burgers with 2 150g patties. Great stuff!
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.
I think wider is better so you don't have to unhinge your jaw like a snake to eat it.
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.
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.
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!
a sufficiently tall and narrow burger ain’t a burger anymore
It's a hotdog.
It's true. I'm a bartender. When I serve a drink in a to-go cup I sometimes get people bitching "oh, that's all I get?" and then I passive aggressively demonstrate to them that it's the same as it would be in a pint glass but it's just shorter and wider.
If they wanted a good deal, they should have stayed at home and drank alone in the basement. Works for me.
It's fucked up, because those same people will buy a daiquiri without second thought.
Don't fucking people do anything for themselves anymore. I mean this is like a service economy right so everybody's just going around wiping each other's buttholes and passing Around 20 bucks.. Just like having to explain the most elementary things, you know, it's just ridiculous. Like having you ever just like drank whiskey out of like any fucking thing you can find. But then you're trying to be responsible and you measure it out. But then you end up drinking like half or all the bottle. Clearly, in a normal cup, a shot of whiskey looks like nothing.
It's not a comparison of size, it's just the formatting of the sandwich to fit better with the way the human jaw is made... What a dumb argument
Literally at my restaurant right now the burger with 3 smaller patties is more popular than the burger with 2 bigger patties. Same total amount of meat, just taller on a smaller bun...
Well yeah I'd want that meat in three smaller patties instead of two larger ones. More maillard reaction.
People are stupid.
Nobody said it. So be it...
A regular size, ⅓lb burger is plenty for anybody. If it was unsatisfying, use better ingredients or stronger flavours.
Because nobody is asking that or you.
Get away from me, satan. No burger tastes as good as being able to see my own junk without a mirror
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.
I'm having flashbacks to having to explain to idiots that one large pizza is way more pizza than two medium pizzas.
Burgers should neither be taller nor wider. Just give me two normal sized burgers.
How about you unhinge your jaw like your little sister
Or eight. I have a large appetite. I'm only 10kg overweight. Honestly, a monster burger sounds pretty good too. I have eaten a few challenge burgers (and won) but the ones that are ten patties tall, you have to dismantle them to eat them. I support wider burgers. But every topping needs to be all across the thing or they are just serving lazy garbage.
At a certain point you have to cut the burger like a pizza though
Mmmh, pirger.
But you dont have to dislocate your jaw ro eat it :)
The fundamental problem is that burgers are a stack.
True, a burger queue might be more advantageous.
B-Tree burgers.
I prefer my burgers as red black trees
So what your saying is we need a better burger backend dev?
I mean, humans completely suck at evaluating vertical distances, thinking that taller = more is just further evidence, I'd say
Yup. Which sold better, the whopper (wider) or the big Mac(taller)
I am going to assume big mac only on the basis that McDonalds has more sites. Whopper tastes better though.
I want a place that makes tiny burgers
Forget the premium burger places where burgers are held together by whaling harpoons and you need to eat them deconstructed. Instead of one giant undesirable burger give me a plate with 4 regular sized burgers in exciting variations.
Give me a chicken chili burger, a double irish beef patty blue cheese burger, an italian herb lamb patty and as a chaser a smoked bison brisket with bourbon sauce.
All on one plate. I would be happy
4 burgers. 1 plate. 0 regrets.
And if you don't like one, you have 3 more chances to forgive the cook.
You could also just have 2 regular sized ones or stop being such a fat ass.
counterpoint: wattaburger in texas is very popular
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
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.
So the invisible hand of the market has spoken, I see
Yesss, taller burgers are anything but nice.
Just go snake mode and unhinge your jaw.
I was on your side until that gibberish about Chicago style pizza.
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.
Heuristics are real things deserving of both respect and fear.
As a sophisticated man of discriminating taste and impeccable manners, I eat these crazy tall burgers with a knife and fork. Just kidding, I use a knife and fork because they are too tall for my mouth and too messy for my beard.
A beard is for enjoying leftovers later. Get with the program, beardo.
As a person who cannot unhook my jaw in the same way that a snake is able to, I am all for the idea of wider, flatter burgers.
I come from a country where burgers get wider, not taller.
which one?
Especially sucks for people with jaw problems who can't open their mouth that wide. But you're totally wrong about deep dish pizza
Pizza casserole isn't bad but it also isn't pizza really, it's a casserole they pretend is pizza. It's just like those cake doughnuts, they aren't doughnuts, they're batternuts, and that's fine but Dunkin needs to quit lying to everyone.
I get bigger burgers not for more food but for more satisfying bites. A tall stacked smash burger or a juicy pink tall burger are way more satisfying to bite into
Three or four patties do not make a big burger, in my opinion they begin at 8 stacked, or at least a kilo if it is a single patty. You're describing a regular snack of a burger. I want all of the fixins too.
I'll take whatever gets my beard the least messy.
Chilis used to make a Terlingua Pride Burger, it was wide AF. It was kinda fun, but the bun got soggy before you could finish it and it would start to fall apart.
Still miss it, though.
if i'm hungry enough to want a huge burger, i'd rather have two reasonably sized burgers instead.
I want a burger with the least amount of surface area.
Ah yes, the sphere burger
How do you think it would be constructed? A meatball between two regular buns? A meatball wrapped in buns? Or, perhaps, a bun core, a meatball mantle, and a bun crust?
Yeah but A&W tried numbers. A purely vibes based experiment with burger width vs height may prove differently.
Learn how to cook.
Wider means you get more of the same, taller means you can get more ingredients. If I order a burger with all the fixings, I'd rather a tall burger than lettuce to one side and onion to the other.
I agree that you can get more ingredients, but I can fit a lot of ingredients in a burger that doesn't have to be a mile high. I don't want a quarter inch (6+mm) of red onion on a burger. I don't want a giant piece of lettuce like you mentioned. I don't need thick tomatoes either.
Not that we should eat this, but I can go toasted Brioche bun, light BBQ sauce, 1/5 pound pattie, pulled pork mixed with Mac and Cheese, caramelized onions, light BBQ drizzle, toasted top brioche bun and that's a lot to put on a burger but it can be done easily without your mouth having to be unhinged to bite into it. Someone will probably tell me to throw cheese in there, because we Americans are hurting for a heart attack, but still easily doable.
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
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.
Just sell by patty weight.
Well obviously more slices = more pizza.
Who would even eat the taller pizza? I'd find it disgusting. I'm not saying anything about the burger.
You have just insulted everyone in Chicago.
Deep pan pizza is pretty good.
Lol you know nothing about pizza. There's pizza al trancio, pizza al tegamino, generic pizza alta, pizza doppia pasta (double dough), so on...
Source: Italian
Well that only works because pizza is a 2 dimensional food