Food Snark

I wasn’t planning to do a follow-up on yesterday’s post about IHOP – or, as they have temporarily re-branded themselves, IHOB for International House of Burgers. I figured that mocking them for the promotion – not so much because it was ill-advised as much as it was pointless and probably redundant – would be a fun post to write, and hopefully read, and that everyone else would lose interest in the story as quickly as I did. A generation ago, or even a decade ago, that would probably have been the case, but in the world of social media nothing ever goes away quietly…

Not surprisingly, Business Insider ran a short piece on Tuesday recounting some of the replies that competing hamburger chains had tweeted, which is a valuable service for those of us not currently on Twitter, by the way. Wendy’s already has a reputation for snarky tweets, so you would probably have been expecting them to comment. Their reply was “Can't wait to try a burger from the place that decided pancakes were too hard,” which I feel shows the proper spirit. Red Robin, another likely competitor I had mentioned in yesterday’s post tweeted that “We’re as serious about pancakes as @IHOb is about burgers,” which is probably also what you’d expect. Seeing A&W Restaurants get into it by tweeting a version of their logo turned upside-down and adding “We don’t know what it means either,” was a bit more unexpected, because I hadn’t realized that the restaurants division of A&W was still in business…

IHOP appears to have been expecting the tweet storm, as well, since their response “We don't want any beef with you, we just want to share our beef with the world," seems a little too rehearsed to be natural. Their CEO was later quoted as saying that “If we have other people in the world of burgers commenting on our burgers, it can only help,” which also suggests that they had anticipated the reaction from the industry. I personally thought that Waffle House had the best reply, though; asked by one of their fans (in a tweet) “Please stay waffle house don’t become burger house!” the company’s own Twitter account replied “No worries here...”

We’ve discussed the question of whether all publicity is good publicity, or whether being publically mocked – regardless of the platform on which that is happening – is worth the lost business from people who will decide that your original move was bone-headed enough to motivate them to avoid your company. In this case, I really doubt whether IHOP is actually going to lose business over the IHOB strategy; they’re an iconic part of American life, and anybody who wants cheap breakfast food at all hours of the day or night (and doesn’t have a Waffle House nearby) will probably continue going there…

Whether or not their new burger offerings gain traction, or whether people start visiting the restaurants during the off-peak lunch and dinner shifts in which they were trying to pick up ground remains to be seen, however…