A&W's cheaper, bigger Third Pounder lost because diners misread fractions
In 1985 A&W launched a burger with a third of a pound of beef, priced below McDonald's Quarter Pounder and winning taste tests. It flopped. Owner A. Alfred Taubman later blamed research showing many Americans assumed one third was smaller than one quarter, because three is smaller than four.
The chain grew out of a root beer stand Roy W. Allen opened in Lodi, California, on June 20, 1919, first serving a homecoming for returning World War I soldiers and then selling glasses for five cents. Prohibition, beginning the following year, gave a drink with beer in its name an unexpected boost. Allen teamed up with his employee Frank Wright, and in 1923 they opened a drive-in in Sacramento named from their initials, famous for root beer poured into mugs chilled in a freezer.
Franchising began in 1926 and drew an ambitious early partner: J. Willard Marriott, who took rights for Washington, Baltimore and Richmond in 1927 and turned his stands into Hot Shoppes, the seed of a hospitality empire. A&W reached 2,000 restaurants by 1960, opened in Winnipeg and Montreal, Okinawa, Guam, Malaysia and, in 1962, West Germany's first drive-in. A Lansing franchisee named Dale Mulder added bacon to a regular's cheeseburger in 1963, earning the chain credit for inventing the bacon cheeseburger.
Decline followed a peak of 2,400 units in 1974, when A&W outnumbered McDonald's. Lawsuits, unhappy franchisees and patchy standards took their toll, and many operators rejected a new royalty-based contract once their long original deals expired. By the mid-1980s under Taubman, fewer than 500 locations remained.
Today the chain, sold by Yum! Brands to a franchisee consortium in December 2011, has over 900 outlets in 16 countries, and Indonesia has become its biggest foreign market. Canada's A&W has been a separate company since 1972. The ill-fated burger returned in 2021 as the 3/9 Pound burger, a joke at the expense of that old confusion.
Source: A&W Restaurants
