No Two Quarter Pounder Beef Patties Weigh Exactly Alike
Photoshopped from Getty Images
In my series of articles Hiding Inflation, I showed how American food products are each year becoming lower in quality, fewer in quantity, slimmer in size, lighter in weight, reduced in volume, and in general providing less actual product for more money in order to hide true inflation or agflation.
In a world filled with shrinking toilet paper and over-puffed bags of chips it would be greatly appreciated if some businesses would just once give us something larger or heavier or more valuable without charging us more money. And it may appear that one company did just that. I'm referring to fast food giant McDonald's decision this year to increase the weight of their pre-cooked Quarter Pounder beef patty from 4.0 ounces (113.4 grams) to 4.25 ounces (120.5 grams). But this is a case of sleight of hand: on one hand we have a beef patty that is now a quarter of an ounce heavier than before and on the other hand we no longer have an Angus Third Pounder hamburger (which McDonald's discontinued back in 2013).
So what did McDonald's do? They took a Third Pounder (151.2 grams) that sold for $3.99 in 2013 and seeing that prices were going to rise over the next few years, decided to mask the increase in costs by selling the new, heavier quarter pounder for that same price of $3.99. For those handy with a calculator, that means that now we are getting an ounce less beef for the money.
But to the unsuspecting public it looked as if McDonald's was simply making their burgers bigger and better:
CNBC, 26 Jun 2015, McDonald's Quarter Pounder is getting bigger (really!)
Beefier is better. Or at least that is McDonald's bet as it tries to increase burger sales.
The chain is coming out with a bigger quarter-pounder patty that will weigh 4.25 ounces before cooking and have a new shape, making it more of a quarter-pounder plus, according to an internal document reviewed by CNBC.
For those wondering about the weight of the quarter pounder after frying: the old patty was 2.8 ounces versus 3 ounces for the new one.
Since it seems that McDonald's and other companies in our country are afraid to directly and clearly raise prices without some sort of sizing obfuscation, we can expect the next iteration of this process from McDonald's to be a doubling the pre-cooked weight of the regular hamburger from 1.6 ounces to 3.2 ounces and charging more than twice as much. The new increased weight will be touted while the increase in price will be muted. Anything to confuse the consumer.
Beef Patties and Quantum Mechanics
Years ago I had a discussion with a fellow physics student where I insisted that, like snowflakes, no two Quarter Pounders can possibly weigh the same. Here is my argument: any Quarter Pounder weighing 4.0 ounces on a regular scale significant to two digits of accuracy on the quantum level weighs 4.0 ounces plus or minus a Planck's Constant discrepancy on the order of more than 33 significant digits. To put that in perspective, even if McDonald's sells a billion billion billion burgers there is only a .0000001 % chance that any two burgers would weigh exactly the same.
Readers who are not familiar with quantum mechanics should be informed that the above analysis assumes that no quantum effects take place while weighing. However in real life, in the Universe we live in, the weight of the patty changes up to a billion billion times every attosecond (one quintillionth of a second). Which is to say that a given hamburger does not have the same weight and will not have the same weight with itself even if you weigh it a trillion times a second for the next few trillion trillion years until the end of eternity at which time it will weigh nothing at all.
