The Great Hamburger Collapse: The Real Reason They're Failing and Who's Next

Let’s get one thing straight: I don’t care about Katy Perry. I don’t care about her trip to space on Jeff Bezos’s flying midlife crisis. But I absolutely live for the moment when a smug, loudmouthed corporation gets its teeth kicked in. And boy, did Wendy’s just get a face full of steel-toed boot.

You remember it, right? Back in April, the “edgy” Wendy’s social media team, probably a 24-year-old who thinks sarcasm is a personality, decided to take potshots at Perry’s space flight. "Can we send her back?" they tweeted, to the roaring approval of their terminally online followers. It was classic corporate trolling—punching down for clout, acting like a brand is your cool, cynical friend.

Well, it turns out karma has a long memory and a wicked sense of humor. Because now, six months later, Wendy’s is announcing the closure of up to 350 restaurants, and Perry’s manager, Bradford Cobb, is on Instagram making sure every last person sees the news. He didn’t even have to add a caption. He just posted the headline from a story titled Wendy's To Close 350 Restaurants — Why Katy Perry’s Manager Is Poking Fun - Wendy's (NASDAQ:WEN). The silence was deafening, and frankly, more brutal than any snarky tweet ever could be.

The PR Spin is More Nauseating Than a Day-Old Frosty

So Wendy's is in damage control mode. The stock is circling the drain, down a staggering 47% this year. Same-store sales are in the toilet. And what’s the official line from the C-suite? Interim CEO Ken Cook gets on a conference call, probably staring at a sea of nervous faces, and says they’re closing "consistently underperforming" locations to "boost sales and profitability at nearby locations."

Let me translate that corporate garbage for you. It’s the business equivalent of saying, “We’re not getting dumped, we’re just giving them the freedom to see other people.” It’s a pathetic attempt to frame a massive failure as a stroke of strategic genius. This isn't a brilliant business pivot. No, 'brilliant' ain't the word—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire they're trying to sell as a controlled burn.

They're like a ship captain who, after hitting an iceberg, announces to the passengers, "Great news! We're strategically jettisoning the underwater portions of the vessel to improve buoyancy!" Give me a break.

And while all this is happening, what’s their big new idea? Chicken tenders. They’re called “Tendys.” That’s it. That’s the grand plan to save the company. While McDonald’s and Burger King are eating their lunch, Wendy’s is hoping a new menu item with a cutesy name will fix a foundational rot. It’s so hopelessly out of touch, you almost have to respect the audacity. They think we're all idiots who will just swallow this PR line, and honestly...

You Can't Tweet Your Way Out of a Bad Business

Here’s the part that really gets me. This whole saga is the perfect endpoint for the decade of "sassy brand" social media. Every corporation wanted to be the Wendy's of their industry. They all hired armies of young creatives to shitpost their way into cultural relevance. It worked for a while. It got the retweets, the likes, the fawning headlines about "how to do marketing in the 21st century."

But what happens when the product sucks? What happens when your sales are tanking and you’re shuttering hundreds of stores, laying off who knows how many people? Suddenly, the sassy mascot doesn’t seem so clever. It just seems like an arrogant prick who was too busy writing jokes to notice the business was crumbling.

Did anyone in that marketing department stop to ask if making fun of a pop star was a better use of company time than, say, figuring out why people would rather go to Burger King? Or is the entire C-suite just so high on their own PR that they actually believe their own spin? Then again, maybe I’m the crazy one for expecting a massive corporation to have any self-awareness at all.

The internet loved Wendy’s when they were on top, roasting their rivals and acting untouchable. But the internet also loves a downfall. And watching Katy Perry’s manager deliver the final, quiet blow is a masterclass in revenge. It’s a reminder that clout is fleeting, but a bad balance sheet is forever.

So Much for Being Edgy

At the end of the day, this isn't really about Katy Perry. It's about a company that got so addicted to the cheap high of online snark that it forgot its actual job: selling burgers. They built a brand on a persona, and now the persona is all that’s left as the business itself falters. The schadenfreude is delicious, and offcourse, it's served fresh, never frozen. Maybe they should spend less time on X and more time in the damn kitchen.