This crawl started by seeing AK in a snapchat picture with a BK+Budweiser filter. I wondered what that bullshit was all about and ended up reading a press release saying Burger King had a limited time burger for sale.
The burger was hyped as best as it could be, I suppose. It was a double cheeseburger with more shit on it. The part that caught my eye was “features two savory flame-grilled beef patties totaling more than ¼ lb.* of beef” Wow, guys. Two patties to make a quarter-pounder, huh? I’m not going to say it’s more than a quarter pound, because otherwise they’d be bragging it was 1/3 pound. Or maybe not, since stupid Americans don’t understand 1/3 is more than 1/4.
Anyway, that got me reminiscing about how I used to love double cheeseburgers at BK. They were the absolute best value on the menu. And then they shrunk the fuck out of them around the great recession, 2008 or so. I wish I could prove it.
Maybe I can. I went looking for nutritional information and ended up on a site that had these impressively accurate meter thingies about the BK double cheeseburger.
Does the taste good? Of course the does!
And from this page, I got a number, a serving size. 171 grams, which is .377 pounds and must include the bun. So, how do I find out how good things were back in the day? Well, I use my favorite tool for exposing embarrassing facts, the Wayback Machine.
Looking at the nutritional info for the double cheeseburger on BK’s site from 1999, I get another number, 198, which is .436 pounds. So, you do the math and see how much it’s lost over the years. Tip, calculate it as a percentage to make it sound more impressive. The Fake News Media does it all the time. (Seriously, I don’t care which side you’re on or what you believe. If you see an article on anything that only uses percentages, be skeptical. They’re selling it to you.)
But that’s not the end of the data. After I got the serving size from the old archived BK website, I felt like an idiot for not just going to the current BK site instead of this “Durr, click Delicious or Disgusting button, pleez” website. And when I went to BK’s current site, I got yet another number. As of May 2018, the size of a double cheeseburger is 148 grams, or .326 pounds.
To summarize, in 1999, BK’s double cheeseburger was .436 pounds, and in 2018 it is .326 pounds. That’s a reduction of .110 pounds, which is a 25% reduction from the 1999 size. Oh no! Percentages! I’ve destroyed my credibility by at least 108%.
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