People love writing about—and criticizing—how millennials eat, travel, work, and can’t afford to buy property. In 2016, Bon Appétit magazine ran a story titled, “Just How Food-Obsessed Is the Typical Millennial?” The piece reported that millennials spend $96 billion a year on food. But that figure presumably included ALL young people of a certain generation. Late Sunday night, whoever had the keys to the magazine’s Twitter account bumped the old story and tweeted, “The average millennial spends $96 billion on food.”
The average millennial spends $96 billion on food. Here's how we break it down https://t.co/VoUan99Tbq pic.twitter.com/nYr7c2Yfan
— Bon Appétit (@bonappetit) September 18, 2017
The tweet didn’t give a time frame for this figure. Is this how much money millennials spend on food in a year? A lifetime? A weekend away? And is that figure for just one young person?
People tried doing the math.
— DON (@DONJVLIO) September 18, 2017
— Follow the Lita (@CarmElectronica) September 18, 2017
Rent $800
— tape 🍉 (@tape) September 18, 2017
Data $150
Utility $150
Food $96,000,000,000
Candles $20
someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my fami https://t.co/FcnTCNqKcL
Lol. "Averaging" is hard. https://t.co/SY0Bo8oFGh
— MZ — “Free-for-all hellscape” (@zwirnm) September 18, 2017
Maybe millennials just aren’t good at math.
Once people realized that the figure was tweeted in error, they thoroughly roasted it.
shit that's where the 96 billion dollars that I'm missing went. https://t.co/50NGXVHGK7
— Robert O'Neill (@RobertONeill31) September 18, 2017
https://twitter.com/darth/status/909788615873511425
Avocado toast is *way* more expensive than I thought. https://t.co/RikmGZD955
— Catherine Q. (@CatherineQ) September 18, 2017
Bon Appétit humbly accepted defeat on Twitter.
*Sips coffee* This is why you don't tweet at 1 a.m. https://t.co/NWagrQFNwi
— Bon Appétit (@bonappetit) September 18, 2017
But was the tweet simply another error made by a social media editor? Bon Appétit has made headlines in the past for its tweets—which is unusual for a food and lifestyle account.
In May, there was the controversial “hand salad” tweet.
It's called a "hand salad" but let's not focus on that https://t.co/fRTxgR79cY pic.twitter.com/XWY0mbAqF4
— Bon Appétit (@bonappetit) March 27, 2017
In April, the account deleted a tweet that mocked romance novels.
.@bonappetit have deleted their massively ill-worded tweet but screencaps are a wonderful thing… #fail pic.twitter.com/XHNy87R9qA
— The Dread Pirate Rowan (@AlternateRowan) April 12, 2017
Last year, they also deleted a tweet that tried to make potatoes political.
this is the tweet they deleted. pic.twitter.com/m8Jx30Cetg
— Jenny Yang (@jennyyangtv) November 24, 2016
What is going on at Bon Appétit’s social desk? Maybe they’re trying to troll us all.