Few people will have failed to learn of the viral trend in which singletons go to Mercadona between 7 and 8pm with a hidden badge to say they are available for flirting. But it is having a downside too, says Eugene Costello…
Few people will have failed to learn of the viral trend over the past week that sees singletons head for Mercadona between 7 and 8pm to grab a hidden secret badge to say they are available for flirting. It’s a viral trend that has been incredibly successful at increasing the brand’s visibility (as if the market leader needed that), garnering millions of views on social media.
The rules are simple. Simply hang out at Mercadona between 7 and 8pm with an upside-down pineapple in your trolley, mill about the aisles and look for others also advertising their availability with the same inverted fruit. On TikTok alone, the brand already had a visibility of some 500,000 users, and as of yesterday, it had already exceeded 8 million.
But not everyone is delighted. There is a downside, and it seems that it is the store’s employees who are paying the price.
Pineapples are now becoming forbidden fruit
Videos are going viral on social media, especially TikTok, showing the havoc the trend is causing among store employees. The main problem seems to be that the pineapple trend is chiefly attracting teenagers with little intention of doing any meaningful shopping. This is annoying genuine customers thanks to overcrowding in the aisles and in the checkout queues.
And employees are grumbling that it is part of their working day, yet they are having to contend with bunches of teenagers treating the store as though they were at a disco or nightclub.
One video that has now gone viral shows exasperated employees carrying crates of stacked pineapples, removing them from the fruit stands and placing them into a cold storage room that is not accessible to customers between 7 and 8pm. It is an unintended consequence of what perhaps started as a clever marketing ploy.
For the lovelorn, if your local Mercadona is not yet hiding its pineapples, get down to Love Aisle-Land and grab a pineapple. You never know. Worst case scenario, you can have fritters for tea. Or one of those abominable Hawaiian pizzas. God forbid you should genuinely need to buy a pineapple in the Flirting Hour.