Burger King is running a strange promotion on Facebook: for every 10 friends you drop from your list, they’ll send you a coupon for a free hamburger, because you love the Whopper more than your friends.
Let’s see…I’ve got 3,747 friends on Facebook. That would mean I could get 374 free pieces of meat between slabs of bread, and each of you is worth what, about 30¢?
By the way, I have discovered that when you have that many facebook friends, it has some very rough spots. There are a few places where you click on something, and it asks if you want to send something to any of your friends, and it has to sit there loading all 3,747 names with pictures and links, and it takes something shy of forever. Maybe I should drop a few thousand of you…
(Nah, I wouldn’t do that.)
You should really get one of those public figure fan pages as well. I can’t imagine how you get any use out of facebook with that many “friends”. I certainly don’t mind if you drop me, as long as there’s a fan page.
Go for it. Obviously throw the shoe leather, sorry, burgers in the bin. In the time you do this you can look up ‘friend’ in a dictionary, which doesn’t mean “Stranger who admires you”.
Facebook- proof science can be evil as well as good.
Last Hussar
Grumpy Old Man, (and worth possibly half a burger).
This is Burger King we’re talking about. Real meat has nothing to do with it, I’m afraid. They serve some sort of meat flavored mousse.
I recommend dropping all of your friends, and re-siding your house with the meat patties.
Eh, you can add me and then drop me, in case you feel like taking 375 local people out for fast food.
Yeah, you really need one of those “Fan” page thingys, so you can confine your FB “friends” to something closer to real F&B (flesh & blood) friends.
Do you get any Mountain Dew with that?
Hmmmm- I don’t know if that burger would be worth it:
http://www.bionicburger.com/
They are jealous of folks having friends obviously…seeing as they seem a tad light on the social arena!
And what about folks that do not have 10 friends on face book…is this not discrimination?
Pick me! Pick me!
No wait. Pick someone else.
If the coupon was for wendy’s or A&W, I’d be all over that. For burger king, not so much. Especially after that whole softcore burger campaign they had going.
Why is this kind of reminding me of the Volkswagen “My Fast” commercials?
JC
I second #1 and #6 – public figure page so that we can become fans.
Just for that I have added you as a friend on Facebook!
BTW how do you prove that you actually deleted friends?
Well, just sent you a friend request on facebook, too – eight more and you get one extra Burger!
Burger King is… well, it’s better than McDs. I’ll actually eat their ‘beef’, something I fastidiously avoid at McDs (and prefer to avoid at Wendy’s).
I won’t be getting any free burgers from this, though, as I’ve never used Facebook and have no intention of starting.
Ha! I am not one of your Facebook friends, PZ. There’s no way you can drop me in return for (a 10% stake in) some chewy processed beef!
Spray me with Coke, though, and I might melt.
I just want to say that I value your facebook friendship (please don’t delete me)
I know this is COMPLETELY unrelated, but…
I was wondering if you’d seen that someone is trying to legally challenge the atheist bus ads because – get this – it’s not “truthful” or “substantiated” that there probably is no God. Oh man, I hope this one plays out in some very public arena.
I posted about it here, although my post is pretty much just basking in the ridiculousness.
Figured the Pharyngulites would get some luls out of it as well.
If your local food back is willing to take Burger King coupons (an iffy proposition, I admit), I say drop all off us from facebook and donate the coupons.
PZ
You should really give Muse142’s link it’s own thread.
That could turn out fabulous.
…several heart attacks, along with the permanent indigestion and occasional bouts of food poisoning and/or diarrhoea.
Ferrous Patella just beat me to it.
I think it would be great if you took advantage of the situation to help the needy. We may make fun of BK burgers, but there’s lots of cold, hungry people out there who would be very grateful of a free meal.
I didn’t find out that it’s only open to US residents until after I’d already deleted people, and found I couldn’t enter a postal code instead of a zip code.
Crap.
related:
http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
The complaint about the atheist bus campaign is genuinely like something from The Onion.
Think of all your friends, deleted,
Just for burgers, barely meated,
Friendship–just like that, so fickle,
Just so you can hold your pickle
Your former friends, they are the ones
Who put the meat between your buns
If you’d trade friends for meat and mustard
I, for one… am just disgustard.
(And now this silly writing ends–
I’m off to sell my facebook friends.)
*ok, I am not even on facebook.
Cuttlefish @ #27:
… PZ has 3,747 people who ‘put the meat between his buns’?
Wow. Guy gets around. Does the trophy wife know?
OK, how about this, drop us all, get the coupons and send them to your local food shelf. Within about 3 days you could probably have almost all of us back being “friends” with you again anyways.
I know it’d be preferable to give a coupon to the local farmer’s market, but it’s better than nothing. Just a thought.
Now if you could just get crackers instead of burgers…
DO IT PZ! UNFRIEND THEM ALL! Think about it, 374 FREE Whoppers. You could go into burger king slap down all those coupons and walk out with 374 FREE Whoppers. Heck, the restaurant might have to shut down just to get more meat! I’ll friend you right now just so you can unfriend me!
Hey Burger King isn’t all that bad. I worked in one off and on in high school and part of college in the mid 90’s. It is real ground meat in the burgers, probably beef. It came in three, then two diameters, all the same thickness though. The smallest diameter (for kid’s plain hamburgers and cheeseburgers) got dropped and replaced by the mid-sized Whopper Jr diameter (I made…lots of burgers). Around about the same time the small french fries in the little paper sack was dropped, mediums in the cardboard cup became the new small, large became medium, and a new “I’m too damn fat” crate became the new large (…lotta fries too). I will never forget coming in at 4:30 AM to arrange the freezer after the semi was unloaded. Ever seen 1.5 tons of frozen french fries? It was like a 6-foot cube of 40 pound boxes.
Thank you, Muse142. I love that story. Love it.
Between this and the “Whopper virgin” commercials, I think BK must be trying to see how repugnant they can be and still make (even more?) money.
PZ feel free to delete me if you’re hungry. I never check facebook anyway.
Plus you can re-add me later if you feel the urge (not sure why you would).
I likes to eat my friends
And make no bones about it
I likes to eat my friends
I couldn’t do without it
Ain’t a man or poet, friend
I know just how you’ll taste
Your limbs go sliding down my throat
And never go to waste…
Hmm… Does anyone make burgers with cuttlefish?
Hey!!!
Does this mean the Creepy King will be your special friend?? I say do it and give the coupons away…might do some good.
Well, PZ, the question I have is why wouldn’t you make me a friend? You can delete me for the 1/10 of a hamburger if you want. Actually, I know why no one wants to be my friend, so, no hard feelings. If I asked myself to be my friend I would turn myself down for being such an ass.
(walks of to a corner to cry by himself)
Who the hell is Burger King’s PR/Advertising agency? They have been running some damn near offensive commercials–the “whopper virgins” nonsense is just *not* funny and the King…well, the “King” is just freakin’ creepy. I guess they just *want* me to consume crap food only at either McDonald’s or Sonic.
I have no friends on facebook.
Because I have no facebook.
Because facebook is ass.
They don’t need to know about me, and anyone who wants to find me and knows my name shouldn’t have any problem at all. And if they want to know what I’m doing, I might tell them. Or not.
So, I’m worth 1/10th of a hamburger.
Lovely. That and the minerals you could smelt out of my corpse might get you the price of a combo meal.
I agree with the above people saying you should get a fan page on facebook and dispense with friends such as myself. Donating them to a food bank or soup kitchen sounds like good idea. As a poor, sometimes very poor student, I have had to make use of the local food bank on occasion and I am sure many people would be happy to have a burger. I certainly would.
tip for facebook – maybe you should set up a fan page, so people who like you and read your blog (like me!) don’t have to actually friend you on facebook (which i feel might be slightly presumptuous since we’ve never actually met). But i’d love to be a fan of yours!
thanks for all the insights into both biology and religion (or lack thereof).
Cuttlefish, you outdid yourself today.
“Friendship–just like that, so fickle,
Just so you can hold your pickle”
Oh, you have a naughty mind. Or is that me?
Seriously, Santa Claus brought me your book for Christmas. Thank you for publishing at Lulu.
Oh no you just friended me today! Does that mean I’m the first to go? Sigh, as long as you enjoy that burger.
I won’t be offended if you drop me from facebook. It is a good way of keeping contact with friends and family, but it is not an eloquent way to hold a conversation with multiple people.
Why would I mess with facebook when the blog is so much easier (and funner) to use?
Wow. What a weird, bass-ackwards message for an advertising campaign.
“Burger King. For people who value their appetites more than friendship.”
Or:
“Burger King. For people who’d sell their friends for a lousy burger.”
Or simply:
“Burger King. For people who have no friends left.”
That being said: Yes, by all means, drop the friends, get the coupons, and give them to a food bank or homeless shelter. I’m sure they’d be grateful.
Yet another reason I’m not even on Facebook or its ilk.
From a neurological perspective, studies have been performed that suggest the mind can only fully perceive about 150 people, after which they just become fragments of people that merge and diverge because of a loss of “hard drive” space. Hence, anyone with over 150 friends on facebook is saying something about how they view friends; which can only be that, with 3,400 friends, you’ve got a lot of hard drive space. (Whereas the rest of us are eighties Macintosh’s.)
And they call us the immoral jerks. It’s the atheists who say, the hell with us. Drop us and give the food to the poor.
I say bravo, and you should.
C’mon, PZ. I need to have someone respectable to tag in all my Facebook notes.
Center for Biological Diversity:
USDA Wildlife Services, a secretive federal agency that has largely avoided public scrutiny, employs a variety of cruel and often haphazard and indiscriminate methods to kill wildlife. Animals are shot from airplanes and helicopters, poisoned, gassed in their dens, bludgeoned after capture in steel leghold traps, strangled in wire snares, and pursued with hounds and then shot. Other animals, even family dogs and cats, are unintentionally injured or killed by agency actions. In 2007 alone, Wildlife Services killed 2.4 million animals, including 121,565 carnivores. The agency reported it spent more than $100 million in 2007 to kill wildlife, most of which was funded by taxpayers. Among those animals killed in 2007: 90,262 coyotes, 2,277 gray foxes, 2,412 red foxes, 2,090 bobcats, 1,133 cats, 552 dogs, 577 badgers, and 340 gray wolves.
USDA Wildlife Services kills carnivores and smaller animals such as prairie dogs to appease the livestock industry and kills a myriad of other animals such as blackbirds on behalf of other agribusiness enterprises. This winter, Wildlife Services killed all 27 wolves of a pack near Kalispell, Mont. In 2008, the agency wiped out seven wolf packs, pups and all, in the Big Sky state. In Oregon, Wildlife Services is coordinating with state officials to kill nearly 2,000 cougars. In New Mexico and Arizona over the past 10 years, Wildlife Services has killed and removed far more than the 50 or so remaining endangered Mexican gray wolves in the wild. The agency has perpetuated hostility towards many carnivore species, especially coyotes, by characterizing them as vermin or nuisance animals. Each year, the agency kills tens of thousands of coyotes.
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2009/wildlife-services-01-02-2009.html
When you shove a burger in you mouth, you are supporting this stuff.
Please don’t eat at Burger King and don’t support with your stomach a livestock industry that is causing the slaughter of so many wild animals.
What #20, #23 & #29 said.
You can re-add friends afterward.
@ #53 CalGeorge
Yeah, because no animals are ever killed in the name of any other type of farming other then livestock. The corn magically flies out of the field and into your local grocer, without harming a single hair of on the head of the small animals that have moved into the field over the course of the season.
Seems a rather bizarre approach for a promotion. I guess it’s gotten them rather more attention than they may have obtained from a more conventional approach, though.
I can’t remember the last time I went into a Burger King. When I’m in the mood for a burger, I go to local burger joints that compete with the chains by offering a better product.
-jcr
You could go into burger king slap down all those coupons and walk out with 374 FREE Whoppers. Heck, the restaurant might have to shut down just to get more meat!
I’ve never worked in the food service business, but it seems to me that you’re talking about much less than a day’s worth of supplies.
-jcr
You could do what Stephen Fry did, I guess: create a friendship-by-proxy group.
It would certainly solve some problems, but… who wants 374 of anything Burger King produces? ;)
I’d bet you’d drop us all in a heartbeat for a decent taco though.
Actually I’m not on Facebook or any of those other things- I’m too much of a damn Luddite for that techno stuff.
Since you admitted to being so promiscuous on facebook, I thought I should add you as well. :) So now you have an extra person to drop for a burger.
Do you mean to tell me this comment list is into the 60s, and still no references to “I can haz cheezburger?” You people must really be slow today…
I just sent you a Facebook friends request. I’ll be happy to stay your friend, or get dropped to give coupons to food banks or homeless shelters.
Soylent King, it’s friends! (and wildlife)