This new ad for Wendy’s lemonade has a blonde young woman look at the camera while holding a cup of the Wendy’s lemonade, and she says: “Hey Wendy: Your lemonade reminds me of the lemonade from my first lemonade stand!” And I guess we’re supposed to feel all nostalgic for the old days when we used to set up lemonade stands in our front yards as kids. But all I can think of is how nostalgia is all any of us have left for such things, as big-government intrusion into our lives has now made the children’s lemonade stand illegal!
Oh, but maybe this is just secret anti-government propaganda disguised as an ad for lemonade? Perhaps Wendy’s is tired of the nanny-state food Nazis breathing down their necks just because they make stuff like the instantly-artery-clogging “Baconator”! (Allegedly the #1 cause of death in the country!) But if they really want the government off their backs for good, they should send them some free samples of the Baconator, and they’ll probably all fall down dead from heart disease! (Allegedly!)
In fact, it is my belief that this whole meat-mountain-burger trend is simply a rebellious reaction to the health-counscious government intrusion into our fast-food industry. So they’re like the Tea Party of burger joints, I guess, fighting back against the over-enthusiastic oppression of out-of-control government’s unfair attempts to keep fast-food restaurants from killing us with fat, salt, carbs, movie tie-in toys designed to trip and kill us when our kids leave them on the stairs, etc. And who can blame them? The Founding Fathers only shrugged off the oppressive yolk of English tyranny so they could set up a country that gave restaurants the right to kill people with the tyranny of American yolk (and non-yolk-related) cholesterol! And if the government tries to prevent Wendy’s from perpetrating their big juicy brand of made-to-order burger murder, it’s only killing us in another, more annoying way!
But seriously, if Wendy’s is trying to call attention to meddlesome government over-regulation and over-reach into our lives, shouldn’t they advertise a new iced tea, and have guys in colonial-era-looking costumes drinking it while insulting oppressive government? The lemonade commercial is fine, for those of us who actually know about all these police-ordered closures of kids’ lemonade stands, make the connection to the oppressive-government angle, and tie it into the government’s new regulations charge on foodstuffs. But what if most people don’t get it, and end up just buying lemonade at Wendy’s instead? Then they will have failed in their messaging! But never fear: for they could then simply spell out their screed on the bottom of the cups of lemonade, so that when you finished drinking it, you’d see the message! Unless you’re drinking it with a straw, I guess. (Which is cheating!)
This ad isn't up on YouTube yet, but here is just the most recent example of the cops enforcing big-government’s putting the kibosh on a kid’s lemonade stand (Oh, the humanity!):
