“Please Pull Deez Nuts up Front”

This week, Jimmy Donaldson (MrBeast) asked his fans to lend him a helping hand by “fronting-up” the stock of his chocolate brand in local Walmarts across the country. Walmart is the retailer with a current (but soon-expiring) exclusive to carry the Feastables chocolate brand, which was launched by the popular Youtuber in 2022.

It’s recently become fashionable to take shots at Jimmy. After providing corrective eye surgery for “1,000 people” in a recent video, opinion pieces began to trickle out, offering spurious critique and particularly bad takes about ableism.

Despite the critique, Jimmy’s work is admirable. But make no mistake, he is a capitalist who has found an excusable avenue (philanthropy) to do just about anything and everything. That includes selling junk food to children through his CPG brand, Feastables, and his fast food brand, MrBeast Burger.

The history of chocolate is rife with stories of exploitation of labor, particularly in countries where cacao is grown. It’s ironic — but not novel — to see a multi-millionaire asking his followers to provide free labor, specifically for a chocolate brand.

As we said in “Guilt-Free Consumerism” from The Senses in May of 2021:

Chocolate as an industry is anything but sweet. With the world’s biggest suppliers (Mars, Nestle, Mondelez, and Hershey) facing a lawsuit in the U.S. for child slavery, the confection has done a lot to earn the title of “guilty pleasure”.

Pashmina Lalchandani, the founder of Bar & Cocoa, is an expert on the topic of fair trade chocolate. According to her, the growth of the “bean-to-bar fair trade market” over the past decade has done little to make a dent in the global chocolate trade, which still utilizes child labor.

Today there are an estimated 2 million children enslaved in the global chocolate trade.

Because of this, it is important to question the ethics of such a request and consider the impact it may have on the already precarious labor conditions in the chocolate industry; even if that industry is being disrupted by creator-led brands such as Feastables; whose demographic is most succinctly summed up by the name of their recent SKU, “DEEZNUTS” — a peanut-butter-and-chocolate Reese’s competitor.

There could be fallout with other creator-led brands, too. More requests from other founders may flood foot traffic into stores. Retailers (in this case, Walmart) would then have issues dealing with unplanned and unmanaged labor; let’s remember that planograms are tightly-managed and policed by third-parties which represent adjacent brands; the very same brands which have already overcome one lawsuit for their labor practices.

Labor exploitation in any form should be examined.

It’s just a shame that the critic-class have already spent their credibility in deriding Mr. Donaldson for things that weren’t worthy of critique.

— Phillip

P.S. Is foot-scanning technology just a cover for fetishists? Probably not. But we ask the question anyway in an actually fun podcast to queue up for your “it’s almost Spring” long-run this weekend. Listen to the Future Commerce Podcast wherever podcasts are found, or reply to this email and I’ll put it on cassette and snail-mail it to you with a player.