McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski is getting roasted on social media for a video that’s gone viral for all the wrong reasons. It was intended to promote the chain’s new burger, but instead it shows just how out of touch the heads of these global companies are — and how even they don’t want to eat the food they sell.
The incredibly awkward video shows Kempczinski sitting at a table in a bland corporate office with a tray of food: fries, a drink, and the new Big Arch burger. He opens the box the burger is in and exclaims a very hyped “wow!” like he’s never actually seen the burger his company is touting right now.
Everything feels stiff and bizarre, but the really strange stuff happens when he attempts to eat the burger: He grimaces as he’s putting the burger in his mouth. “That’s a big bite for a Big Arch,” he says, holding up the burger to the camera with the tiniest bite taken out of it. He barely nibbles at it, and looks slightly distressed — which, by the way, you never see him finish before cutting to “that is so good” in monotone.
‘An Alien’s First Day on Earth’
The internet has picked up on this weird video and ran with it, unsurprisingly. Commenters in a Reddit thread about the video don’t hold back, with one person describing it as “an Alien’s first day on earth.”
“‘I love this product’, ‘it’s a delicious product’,” said another commenter, quoting the CEO in the video. “Is this their official statement that their food is in fact ‘product’ and not actual food lol? What else is this?”
“Perhaps he needs to rehearse eating the product,” responded another commenter.
“Friendly reminder that CEOs speak almost exclusively to shareholders,” said another Redditor, which does help explain his cringe corporate speak that removes any hint that this is actually a food that people eat. “And it shows.”
Other people point out how he seems to be grossed out by the food on his tray. “He doesn’t even know how to hold a burger lol,” points out one Redditor, “and the video cuts after he takes a bite. Didn’t even swallow it.”
“My toddler who survives on air, yogurt covered fruit snack, and a prayer would have taken a bigger bite than that lmao,” said another commenter.
CEOs Are Not Like Us
In case we forgot, this video is a good reminder that CEOs of global companies are so far in a different reality that they might as well be living on another planet. Kempczinski makes over $18 million per year, according to the AFL-CIO, and once you’re in that tax bracket, your world is completely different from ours.
“When big corporate CEOs try to act like ‘one of us’, it just makes me cringe so much,” said one commenter on Reddit. “You were probably created in a lab somewhere, stop trying to be relatable.”
“Yeah, I think he’s just a corporate guy with not much of a personality,” said one of the more charitable Redditors in the thread. “He probably doesn’t want to take a huge bite and get stuff all over his face, because then he’d have to break from the corporate [crap] and be relatable (which is probably difficult for him).”
Other people wondered how employees at McDonald’s even allowed this to be uploaded, figuring that someone must have recognized how insane it was. “What gets me is that they did not need to upload this,” said one.
“I thought about that, but then I thought who’s gonna tell the CEO ‘we can’t upload it because you come off like you’ve never eaten a burger in your life’?” Good point.
“A team of overpaid people saw this and decided to post it,” said another Redditor. If McDonald’s offered to pay us, we could have saved them from this embarrassment.
In the end, the promotional video had the opposite effect on some people. “Tis actually convinced me to stop eating fast food.” Yeah, we’re not really pumped up to head to McDonald’s drive-thru, either.
