French Fries Experiment

French Fries Experiment

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By:

Liem Limanto

Ie Sally Santoso

Reinhart Kurniawan

Vincent Nusalim

Abstract

In this experiment, we are interested in whether fast food restaurants in the Seattle area have the same price per weight for a small French fries menu. In doing this experiment, we collected the weight of small French fries menu from three different fast food restaurants, such as McDonalds, Dicks, and Jack In the Box during lunch and dinner. For each fast food restaurants we collected the data from three different areas, which are Northgate, Ballard, and University District to get more variance and distributed data. Our approach to the observation that we have collected is to measure the weight of the fries using food scale (in grams) we got from Target. After we finished collecting all the data, we found out that each fast food restaurant have different weight and price for their small French fries menu. Using R statistical software, we analyze the data and conclude that the main effect of brand is significant if we do our analysis based on the weight of the fries. However, there is nothing significant if we do our analysis based on the price per weight.

Introduction

We acquire this idea to do the French fries experiment after reading the article in food and health section in learnvest.com, called “The Cost Of French Fries And Other Junk Food, For Wallet And Waistline.” This article basically tells that the average American consumes 30 pound of fries (113 serving), or can be said that they “consume fries twice a week, every week, for the whole year.” This article also gives us a table that shows how people could spend a lot of money just for French fries; the table points out that most Americans spend $168 per year ($6 per pound or 1.32 cents per gram) just to eat fries. After reading and knowing this fact, we are motivated to do this experiment, which is to check the price per gram of different French fries’ brand and to compare which one would be more beneficial (more fries, with the cheapest price). For this trial, we choose the small French fries menu as the object of our experiment.

We pick three different fast food restaurants for this experiment, which are McDonalds, Dicks and Jack In the Box, since they are the most well-known fast food brands in the Seattle area.  All of these fast food restaurants are famous in Seattle, and they might be competing with each other for customers. McDonalds is definitely the oldest among them all; it is founded   in 1940 and has its franchise all over the United States. Jack In the Box, which was founded in 1954 has its franchise in many states in USA as well, whereas Dicks is located only in Seattle (founded in 1954) and it is the youngest among McDonald and Jack in the Box. It will be pretty interesting to see whether these three well-known brands have the same price per gram or not.