The internet is a stage, and someone unwillingly stumbles onto it weekly. This makes them the “main character” online. Sometimes their story is heartwarming, like the Olympic muffins; usually it’s a gaffe. In any case, that main character energy flows through the news cycle and turbo-charges debate for several business days.
Here’s the Trending team’s main character of the week.
It’s the DoorDash customer who had to pick up her own Wingstop.
This one’s funny. After failing to get her order, a woman goes to get her food… whereupon she runs into her delivery driver. Life is amusing like that sometimes.
In a viral video, TikToker Ashlee Cooper (@ashleesellstexas) explains: “As I’m walking into Wingstop, I get a text message that your dasher has picked up your food at 8:49pm. I said, ‘Yeah, I can see her, so I go up to her,’” she says.
She confronts the woman.
“I said, ‘Are you so and so?’ … And she said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘That’s me. I’ve been waiting for it. The app said you were sitting here waiting for my food, which you clearly weren’t,’” she adds.
Cooper then got home, contacted the app, and had her 20% tip refunded.
The story was resonant because it proved to be surprisingly relatable. The one about the rogue delivery person. Viewers chimed in with their own versions of the same story.
One alleged that drivers these days are gaming the app: “It’s because some drivers scam the system… they use bots or have people holding multiple phones, they accept all the orders and wait for someone they work with to show up and then they hand off the food.”
We have not verified that these scams are ongoing. But I believe that this is totally what people are doing.
The U.S. has become DoorDash Nation.
Shoot, both my brother and brother-in-law have done DoorDash and Uber Eats services in recent years. I can confirm the “Should I just blow off this order and possibly bring it to the Sunday Night Football watch party?” impulses are real.
In fact, my brother was our Internet Person of the Year in 2021. Not literally Eduardo Ramirez, beloved father, enigmatic artist, Leo/Virgo cusp, and tireless hard worker. But we used him as a stand-in for the pandemic era’s most unheralded essential worker: The person who brought app-ordered goods to people who work from home.
As we wrote three years ago: “This was the year fast-food workers took their followers behind the scenes, accusing their employers of maltreatment, unsanitary food conditions, and overall negligence. The trend of calling out well-known food chains and brands isn’t going offline anytime soon.”
This proved true. However, the results were less than revolutionary. Whereas during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the American worker became a sympathetic and unlikely main character online; these days our stories require the more selfish, “customer-first” angle for anyone to care.
So back to our main character of the week: Is it the woman who told her story? Or is this an anti-hero journey about a freedom-fighting driver who one day said, “Enough.”
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