My position is to remain highly skeptical of this story. The single source of this entire anecdote comes from a book written by A&W's owner at the time (Alfred

My position is to remain highly skeptical of this story. The single source of this entire anecdote comes from a book written by A&W's owner at the time (Alfred Taubman) that is left almost intentionally vague and has a clear conflict on interest. The book makes a lot of unsourced and unverified claims about how A&W's burger tasted better than McDonald's in blind tests, and a bunch of other claims about how A&W should have outperformed McDonalds, but all because Americans are too stupid to know that 1/3 is larger than 1/4, A&W failed to capture market share and that's why they had a major decline in the 80s. There is no other source for this story whatsoever other than the literal owner of A&W. The marketing firm (Yankelovich, Skelly and White) never released any details, no one else at the company ever wrote about it, and there's no way to independently verify any of these details to really understand what actually happened. As an FYI, McDonald's had a third pounder burger on their menu for 6 or so years and never seemed to have any issue with customers reporting feeling ripped off because of it. They removed it along with all of their premium menu items as part of an effort to simplify their offerings.