Carl’s Jr., the enormous dripping burger fast food chain,
has been using the advertising tagline: “Eat like you mean it” recently. Does
that mean they’re trying to rid the land of the scourge of bulimia? Because it
may not be intentional that people are throwing up after eating their food: you
never know. Maybe it’s just too enormous of a portion, and they can’t fit it
inside themselves for long. Or perhaps they didn’t intend to make themselves
throw up, but all the grease in the food, or the icky dripping burgers in the
ads, make it so they can’t help themselves. Or another possibility I suppose is
that people are going to Carl’s Jr. in large numbers to use the bathroom, but
they accidentally end up eating some of the food from there, regret it, and
throw up. And I suppose it’s possible that the sexy models in the ads are
making themselves throw up after eating the burgers so they won’t gain weight
or get acne, and when the company men see this happening, they assume everyone
is engaging in the same behavior after eating their burgers.
I’m not entirely
sure which of these explanations is correct, or if it’s a combination of all of
the above, but it must be this sort of thing they’re trying to combat with that
tagline, don’t you think? Because why else would they worry about our intentions, so long as we buy the food? And in any case, what business is it of theirs what our intentions are with regard to their food anyway? And using the imperative like they appear to be doing here might
begin to sound a bit bossy to some people, so why not instead simply say: “Please try not to throw up
after eating the food we went to the trouble of making for you.”
Of course, they could just try to make better food their
customers could keep down more easily, but then I suppose it would be a
different restaurant, wouldn’t it?
(Oh, and you know, I don’t remember the burgers from Carl’s
looking quite as good as the burgers in these ads. And it’s a bit harder to eat
like you mean it when the food looks so different from what you were expecting
based upon the advertising images you’ve seen.)
Here are some ads with the “Eat like you mean it” tagline:
