WIBCI if we could do MATH?
Wouldn’t It Be Cool If there were more PROOFREADERS?
I found myself recently baffled by a Lunchaballs commercial. Picture a middle school cafeteria, a boy takes out one of the aforementioned Lunchaballs and makes an offer,
‘I’ll give you 1/5 of my cookies for 1/3 of your pizza.’
The obviously hard-nosed girl at his table counters with a jab,
‘Don’t lowball me Harold, 2/10.’
Harold looks to a nerdy kid with glasses across the cafeteria, whom, apparently, is good enough to get advice from, but not cool enough to sit with. Friendless Poindexter shakes his head in an emphatic ‘No’ advising his client to counter the counter.
‘3/10.’
Without hesitation, sassy girl in the overhauls accepts with a handshake and one word:
‘deal.’
The commercial’s tagline is:
‘Willingly doing fractions, that’s the Lunchaballs effect.’
Now I have some issue with this commercial. Let’s start with the fact the math is wrong.
Harold offered her 1/5 of his cookies and she countered with 2/10…which IS 1/5, a fact that eluded Harold’s brilliant phone-a-friend. Then she accepts 3/10ths?! Show me 3/10ths of cookies please. Now let’s play devils advocate and say that overhauls was countering 1/3 of her pizza down to 2/10ths. But that doesn’t work either because after some intense bargaining, she accepts 3/10ths, which is basically the same as 1/3rd, which is where they started.
What I’m most mad at is that this commercial totes that eating their processed food will promote doing math at lunch. Do we not care that the math is wrong? Did none of the many adults that this copy passed in front of notice or question the maths? AI probably would have actually caught this one. I tried to watch it thinking that they knew the math was wrong, but was going an ironical, quirky route, but gave up on this as they never took the opportunity to do the wink-wink they would never pass up on. So did just no one think to think about the math? This failure failed to be noticed by anyone in pre, production, or post?
huh. I feel It Would Be Cooler If someone noticed and stopped airing this one.
Last Updated on 07/03/2026 by Death of Hypatia Inc.
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