The Great Burger War of 2017

Back in the 1980s, fast-food titans McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s battled it out with TV ads vying for the affection of fans of quick-n-easy dining. Today, it’s the tech giants — Google, Apple, and Microsoft — who are embroiled in a modern-day burger war of their own. So it’s little wonder that Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently announced the reprioritization of his to-do list. Simmering near the top: a rapid response to the growing discontent over the correct way to assemble an emoji cheeseburger.

While tech companies determine their own graphic representation of the symbols known as emojis, they still must pass mustard… er, muster, with the Unicode Consortium, which sets the standard for all emojis. This is why many emojis looks so different across various platforms. It’s a task that they take seriously. Google was recently coerced into redesigning every emoji in the Android universe, which still didn’t please everyone. Even Apple continues to roll out new offerings to the emojiverse. But as the following Tweet handily illustrates, they all seem to differ on the proper way to assemble a cheeseburger.

Not to be left out of this compelling discourse, Snapchat went on to troll Apple and Google with their version of the burger emoji: burger AR lenses.

Upon inspection, it appears Snapchat has decreed that burgers shall be assembled thusly: lettuce, burger, tomatoes, cheese, burger. But Shake Shack’s Culinary Director Mark Rosati disagrees with that placement, backing Apple’s position that the cheese should be placed atop the burger patty. Wendy’s, as is their wont, joined in with a clever, snarky take on the matter. Burger King, despite promising customers to “have it your way,” put their foot down and tweeted their burger blueprint, which also places cheese atop the meat.

Digging deep into this escalating feud, ModSquad has discovered that it was the McDonald’s India Twitter account that set off the firestorm, with this tweet:

Perhaps we should consider that McDonald’s, decades ago, shared their blueprint for the Big Mac in an enduring jingle that still occupies valuable cranial real estate in Baby Boomers and Gen X’ers everywhere:

While the commercial itself seems to mix up the order of lettuce and cheese, we’ll take their word for it.

As social media experts, we’re well aware of the importance of emojis and want to see things return to normal. Let’s face it — after starring in a disappointing movie and now sparking a global imbroglio, it’s hard to imagine that things could get much worse for our poor little emoji. Or could it? Oh, poo.