The Internet Has Been Blessed With The Trippiest Wendy's Training Videos From The 80s, And They're Gold
Oftentimes when you start a new job you have to go through a training period. This usually entails reading manuals, shadowing a colleague, or watching training videos that will help you get a good grasp of your role so you can perform your best.
However, as we've all come to learn at some point in our lives, workplace training videos can be really boring. The voice that narrates these videos is often monotone and the acting is almost always poor, unless it was created by Wendy's in the 80s.
The HR genius behind the fast food company's employee training videos understood that people have short attention spans and would probably not learn anything if they had to sit through hours of boring training, so they added a twist to them.
Wendy's took advantage of the increasing popularity of hip-hop at the time and created a series of videos from the late 80s to the early 90s featuring catchy beats and raps to show employees how to serve drinks and grill a Wendy's-style burger.
The videos, which are now all on YouTube, first began circulating in 2010, however, they didn't garner as much attention back then as they did when radio host Brian Fink recently shared them on Twitter for his nostalgia-obsessed followers.
"Putting in my two weeks to go work at @Wendys. I totally know what I'm doing after watching these!! https://fb.me/8OXsKtL3B" Fink tweeted a few weeks ago.
The videos range from hilarious to bizarre and plain embarrassing, and they have left us with many questions about the policies and regulations that fast food restaurants in the 80s and 90s had to follow, but we treasure them nonetheless.
There are a ton of these Wendy's training materials available on the web, but the two-part "Grill Skills" video is arguably the most fascinating of them all.
"Grill Skills" teaches employees how to properly grill a burger set to the tune of a vintage 80s soundtrack. Wendy's founder Dave Thomas even makes a special guest appearance in the 1989 training video. Much to our dismay, he did not do any rapping.
The trippy video features a man playing an air guitar with a spatula while he waits for the burgers to cook. How does he know they're ready? Well, the burgers grew faces and started singing "We start shrinking, when we hit that grill, you know we will."
I couldn't make this up even if I tried.
You can watch the entire rollercoaster below (fast-forward to the four-minute mark):
How do you feel after that? If you can keep going, here's part two:
Apparently not only did Wendy's employees need to know how to grill a patty well, they also needed to have some flow.
I mean, it's a great tactic to get employees to actually remember what they needed to be doing, but can you actually imagine watching these videos multiple times in a row just to memorize the rap? *Cringe*
Anyway, if upbeat and bizarre training videos are your thing, Wendy's has more to offer, including one that shows employees how to serve chili with cheese. It's easy to fall down this rabbit hole, so don't say I didn't warn you.