I don’t typically watch commercials. Most of the time I wonder how they managed to get approved to be made. One such commercial is this one by Wendy’s.
A Wendy’s employee, and grown man, sees another man who appears to be Santa Clause. The other employees are questioning if it is or not. So the man takes it upon himself to find out. He goes over to Santa and asks to sit down. Before Santa can say anything, the employee sits on his lap. The expression on Santa’s face is one of confusion, anger, and shock. In the description on the Youtube page Wendy’s even admits that if a person doesn’t look like Santa they can enjoy their time in the restaurant relaxing and enjoying the moment.*
Most reasonable people when asked the question, “May I sit?”, would assume that the person is asking to join them at the table. I understand that the crude humor part comes when instead of sitting at the table; the man goes to sit on Santa’s lap. To their credit the Wendy’s employee did ask permission to sit down first. That was the extent of what they got right in the advertisement.
What they got wrong was everything else.
The man asks the question, “Mind if I sit?” A second later he begins to sit on Santa’s lap. Santa didn’t have time to respond to the question. In short, he didn’t give the employee consent to sit at the table, let alone sit on his lap. He didn’t consent to being physically touched by the employee. His expression says it all. It was unwanted physical touching between two people.
Imagine if that happened between two employees, or an employee and a regular customer at the restaurant. Does it have the same humor then?
Update:
Wendy’s turned their video to private. Yet many other locations online had the same video. I added the other and move what I got from their YouTube channel below this update. 2/28/23
Disclaimer:
I summarized the note that is in the description section of the Wendy’s Youtube listing with the commercial. I posted the commercial from Youtube here. This post is meant as a commentary, discussion, and criticism of the commercial. I did not directly quote from their Youtube page the short sentence. At the time of this post the description is in essence what is written here.
Reposted:
This post has been reposted from my old blog: https://roseylinn.wordpress.com/2022/12/03/a-new-holiday-commercial/ It was originally posted on December 3, 2022
A Leisurely Chat 
I really don’t understand what the commercial is trying to say but when I saw the thing I thought it was a bit weird and probably not behavior most folks would engage in.
What are other people saying about it?
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I dont know what message they intended to send. I know the message I got was to be careful of their employees because they might sit on me without my consent.
The comments on the Youtube videos are a mixture of responses. Most who’ve taken time to post a comment seem to think that its the funniest video that they’ve seen. The ones that are critical of the commercial are then being trolled and called names by the others. I thought that was interesting.
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