Imagine: You’re absolutely starving on a Saturday afternoon. You approach the nearest food truck. Just as the grill cook, dressed in a blue button-down for some reason, turns around to give you your food, you recognize him—it’s William, Prince of Wales. An awkward seven seconds pass in which he waits, smiling expectantly, for you to acknowledge him while he holds your burgers.
Unsuspecting customers who sauntered up to a food truck in London this week had this exact experience. In the video, William spends a couple hours handing burgers to customers and talking about his foundation, which awards grants to climate innovators, while a cook in the background makes the actual food. Prince William pulled the stunt with Sorted Food, a channel dedicated to cooking and food. (The creators called it their “biggest collab ever.”)
William isn’t the only public figure LARPing as a service industry worker this summer. Ed Sheeran slung hot dogs at Chicago’s infamously mean Wiener Circle before his concert last weekend. Lana Del Rey was found working in a Waffle House in Florence, Alabama, a couple weeks ago. David Letterman whimsically threw on an apron and pretended to be an employee at a Hy-Vee supermarket in Des Moines, Iowa. I for one think this is all profoundly weird rich-people behavior.
Letterman cracked jokes to people as he bagged their groceries. “Did you hear today celery is free?” He asked one unamused customer at checkout. And he ate snacks, I guess: At one point he opened up a can of soup and drank a generous glug. Sheeran served dogs for a paltry ten minutes before calling it quits. For her part, Lana poured coffee for customers for a whole shift—that is to say, as far as I know, she was actually working. Going above and beyond with customer service, at one point she sang “Amazing Grace” with a diner. She didn’t seem to tip off any press or paparazzi. Instead, customers gradually began to recognize her, and news traveled via word of mouth. “I have so many questions,” wrote one reddit user. “No but really why is Lana Del Ray working at a Waffle House,” reads another mystified tweet.
There is, of course, a method to all this madness: PR. For celebrities, public appearances like this almost always generate media attention that they can link back to whatever project they’re working on. For Lana, it could be her latest album, which references Florence, Alabama. For Prince William, his foundation’s Earthshot Prize; for Letterman, the Hy-Vee Indycar Race Weekend in which he has cars racing; for Sheeran…well, he had a concert next door, but mostly he’s just a weird little guy.
Celebrities keep up these “real world” surprise appearances because a lot of fans love it. "I'm so glad I got to witness it!” One customer told CBS News of Wiener Circle’s Sheeran appearance. “How cool is it that Ed Sheeran gave me a hot dog?" Brits seemed more shocked than anything else at the sight of Prince William. “What just happened,” one gushed. “My brain took like three seconds to buffer,” another said. “Am I dreaming? Have I had enough sleep?” It’s exciting to run into a celebrity and even more so under some faux status-reversal circumstances. Meeting a celebrity in real life humanizes the kind of larger than life figure we’ve seen across media for years—plus you can tell your friends about it. One time Armie Hammer offered to buy me a drink (pre-cannibal allegations) and I’ve been dining out on that story for six years.
In an industry and time in which most servers are overworked and underpaid, though, it’s a decidedly un-cute look to try out a little bit of hourly labor as a treat. The quirky stunt falls flat when I square it with the reality that celebrities will never actually get the real experience of working at these places. If Prince William really wants to grab the attention of normies, he should take a shift at an Applebee’s on a Friday night. He should feel the crushing shame when the 24 year old training him rolls his eyes after William asks a question about what part of the animal the riblets come from. I want him to get snapped at by some woman because he forgot her breadsticks. In fact, I demand it.
As is the case with, dare I say, every PR stunt, it is truly not that deep. But if celebs want to really delight us with their folksy relatable personas, I’d recommend an even more authentic experience: Give away all your money, accumulate a bunch of credit card debt from online shopping just to feel something, and get a survival restaurant gig.