“OK, you haven’t had the full American experience until you try … the Walmaaart,” a young man with a French accent says into the camera in a California parking lot. Once inside, he picks up an extra-large bottle of pasta sauce. “Why is it so big? Why is everything huge?”
He goes for the mayo, equally oversize, and a jar of Skippy peanut butter, and a tube of ground beef, which he holds up. It’s about as long as his torso. “You can feed, like, an entire city,” he marvels, before salivating over Oreos, Nilla Wafers, jugs of milk, eggs, a sausage wrapped in a pancake on a stick. “I love it. This is so insane.”
He is not the only one to think so: During this World Cup summer, Europeans, Australians and other fans from abroad are descending on our Walmarts and Waffle Houses, on our Buc-ees and Bass Pro Shops. They are touring a regular suburban neighborhood in Texas. They are getting free refills at a diner. They are marveling at the power of air-conditioning in big-box stores, at the size of a sleeve of popcorn: “It’s as long as an adult’s arm!” They are awe-struck by America and posting about it. And no one loves this more than American audiences.
The atmosphere surrounding this World Cup has a certain “study abroad” feel to it, as teams and fans from all over the world flock to North American cities, bringing with them emblems of national culture and eager to sample what’s on offer here. (It also reminds me of the “multicultural festival” we celebrated annually at the girls’ school I attended in San Francisco in the early 2000s, when everyone brought in ancestral dishes, reveling in diversity through cultural cliché.) Bound up in sports, all this kitschy nationalism can seem cute rather than alarming. Scots have taken over Boston, drinking its bars dry in kilts! Norwegians are donning Viking hats! Japanese fans are taking their own trash bags to stadiums for after-game cleanup! And in return, on the home field, we Americans can offer the authentic fruits of our national culture: Walmart and mass-produced ranch dressing.
While these videos are going viral, many aren’t quite what they seem. Some are simply resurfaced videos from tourists who visited months ago, or from foreigners who are in town for non-World Cup reasons, simply playing into the trend. As Will Oremus of The Atlantic pointed out, some posters use A.I. to create viral fan-tourist stories. Others are real Europeans in town during the World Cup, but they’re from accounts that seem to be staged for clicks, created by influencers who make careers out of being “Europeans abroad in America.” (They exist in a long lineage of travelogues, many of them filled with hyperbole and sold back home in the Old World — cf. Charles Dickens’s “American Notes.”) Is the roving Scotsman posting on X really impressed by America’s “off-road armored golf carts,” or is he affecting faux naïveté for the camera? This is, after all, the monoculture; they’ve seen it all in the movies and, more recently, other TikToks. But they may also be truly amazed — scale is something that’s hard to communicate until you see it. And anyway, does it matter? Viewers want to believe in the tourists’ childlike awe and delight in it ourselves.
The videos also help flip a well-known script. Rather than the American going to Rome for high culture and ancient wonders, here we see the Europeans come to our turf, admiring things we take for granted as banal. That this is happening in Trump’s America seems more significant. The videos allow us a kind of inversion at a moment when our country’s global stock is low — when tourism has fallen in the United States as it rises elsewhere — and gives us a brief sense of relief that our country might still be enjoyable, the kind of relief we might also feel about air-conditioning (if not, as a general matter, about what we’re paying for health insurance). Who needs the ruins of a lost civilization when you have aquariums in Bass Pro Shops?
These videos also allow us to register through fresh eyes the hyperabundance that exists in our country, and experience just how uncanny some of it really is. It is a historical anomaly, a feature of American prosperity in the last century, that we can walk into a store and see this much of anything at once — a popcorn bag that long, a jar of mayonnaise that gigantic, ground beef that tubular. (Think of Nikita Khrushchev in the supermarket in San Francisco in 1959, marveling at the round orb of a cantaloupe.) Much of this stuff we ourselves critique as excessive, empty calories, or we don’t register it at all — the sheer scale of what we’ve managed to create and consume. Most of the time it’s deflating, seeming more like the byproduct of the declining empire. These TikTok de Toquevilles see our country instead with the delight of a kid in a candy store — which is what we all are like in a Walmart, really — and so we can, too, for a moment.
In “Travels in Hyperreality,” Umberto Eco wrote his own travelogue of the American uncanny: “In America you don’t say, ‘Give me another coffee’; you ask for ‘More coffee’; you don’t say that Cigarette A is longer than Cigarette B, but that there’s ‘more’ of it, more than you’re used to having, more than you might want, leaving a surplus to throw away — that’s prosperity.”
We are in the land of more. And these videos are proliferating this summer, appearing via my algorithms magically like breadsticks at Olive Garden. But it’s more calculated than that: The more these videos generate buzz and comments, the more people are making their own, staging their visits to big-box stores. “I can refill this 1,000 times,” an Italian influencer says, pointing to a cup of Coke with ice, in mock shock. “And it’s free.” He chugs the Coke, smiles maniacally and starts in on another, forging forward through an exaggerated brain freeze and a sugar high. I wanted to watch him drink another: more, more, more!
Sophie Haigney is working on a book about our obsession with collecting objects, from priceless fossils to plastic Power Rangers.
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