Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America's Fast-Food Kingdom by Adam Chandler

Author:Adam Chandler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Published: 2019-06-24T23:00:00+00:00

12 CRISP DIGITAL NUGGETS

Let’s nugget that meat up and make some real money.

—WALLACE

Carter Wilkerson had no way of knowing how profoundly his life was going to change when the sixteen-year-old high school junior in Reno, Nevada, innocuously reached out to Wendy’s over Twitter. “Yo @Wendys,” he asked in 2017, “how many retweets for a year of chicken nuggets?” Within a minute, the Wendy’s account, which has become one of the truer sages of the social media era, responded, “18 million.” It was an impossible order; after all, only one tweet had even reached 3 million retweets before. But Wilkerson quickly took a screenshot of the exchange and tweeted it out to his 150 or so followers with a plea: “HELP ME PLEASE. A MAN NEEDS HIS NUGGS.”

The cruel digital universe, which usually taketh, decided to giveth. By the next morning, Carter’s call for nuggs had been retweeted fifty thousand times. His campaign gained a lovable hashtag slogan, #NuggsForCarter, and an unlikely coalition including social media influencers, young pop idols, Hollywood stars, Kathy Griffin, Senator Marco Rubio, and television anchor Jake Tapper amplified Wilkerson’s tweet with their approvals. “It’s good to have dreams,” added actor Aaron Paul. Even the automatons joined in. Microsoft’s Twitter account blasted out, “We’re in. How about you, @Amazon and @ Google? #NuggsForCarter.” Both conglomerates, along with the Apple Music and Twitter accounts, retweeted in kind. “Live your best life, Carter,” Amazon wrote. “Follow your dreams.” In a tweet, United offered to fly Wilkerson to a Wendy’s anywhere in the world if he hit his target. After Wilkerson’s tweet reached seven digits in just two days, Wendy’s gave the plea new life with a retweet of its own: “1 Million?!?! Officially SHOOK.”

Soon enough, Wilkerson’s lonely request for nuggs approached striking distance of the most retweeted tweet of all time: Ellen DeGeneres’s record-making tweet, a selfie taken live in the middle of the 2014 Oscars telecast, which had been viewed by 43 million people. As DeGeneres had explained in the moment to a bemused Meryl Streep, her hope had been that the selfie of herself with a hastily assembled crew of celebrities would become the most retweeted photo of all time. And backed by the wattage of nearly a dozen A-listers, including Bradley Cooper, Julia Roberts, and predivorce Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, DeGeneres’s post was retweeted over 3 million times. It not only broke the standing Twitter record—a tweet featuring a picture of Barack Obama hugging his wife, Michelle, following his 2012 reelection—in roughly half an hour, it even briefly knocked down Twitter’s server.

What Ellen’s tweet showcased was the rare power of a monocultural moment, such as a presidential election, where a disparate population’s shaky attention span is briefly fixed on one thing. But nothing, not the Super Bowl, the presidency, or the entire Hollywood apparatus stood a chance against the most fixed, basic, and all-encompassing station in the order—humanity’s weakness for the perfectly calibrated siren song of fast food.

As Wilkerson’s numbers drew closer, DeGeneres did not take the development lying down.

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