MrBeast Asks Fans To Clean Up His Chocolate Bar Store Display

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“I need your help!" MrBeast tweeted out. "Next time you see Feastables in Walmart (and soon to be new retailers) if you could clean up the presentation and make it look better that’d make me very happy. I’m building a team to do this routinely, just need help in the short term.”

Some fans were weirdly quick to embrace the request, jumping at the opportunity to tidy up the chocolate bar displays at their local retailer and flooding the thread with pictures of neatened store shelves in hopes of receiving approbation from their favorite content creator. Some even went so far as to praise MrBeast as being some brilliant business mind for mobilizing his fanbase to care about product presentation, with one even going so far as to call out competitor Hershey's, saying that "there's a new and better way of doing things."

Anyone familiar with stan culture is probably not terribly phased by the zealous fanaticism, idol worship and parasocial weirdness it usually entails, but it's the intersection with a new level of late-stage capitalism that seems to have left a particularly strange taste in everyone's mouths. There's the obvious hypocrisy of a multi-millionaire YouTuber asking his fanbase to perform unpaid labor, but it's the way the act is postured as some sort of grassroots marketing campaign to promote his own line of chocolate bars that makes the whole thing feels like a deranged corporate social experiment or a relic of our dystopian present.

Naturally, detractors were quick to turn the bizarre phenomenon into a meme, joking about how they were going to intentionally go out and destroy displays as well as mocking MrBeast's crazed fans by going to ridiculous lengths to punish anyone that dared disturb the neatly lined Feastables.

Coming on the heels of MrBeast's last stunt which saw him pay for a thousand people to get cataract surgery, the crowdsourced marketing ploy has reignited the discourse over the creator's positioning of philanthropy as content. Many have criticized the ethics of monetizing altruism as being emotionally manipulative, virtue signaling and glossing over the larger systemic issues at play. In a similar vein to the video where he restores the sight of hundreds, the chocolate bar tweet has ignited multi-layered debates over whether or not it is truly noble to straightened out a skewed display for underpaid retail workers, even if its a contrived self-serving promo scheme.

It's frankly not as deep as it is a soul-sucking conversation and yet it's like an internet car crash you can't help but watch.

Photo via Getty/Denise Truscello