Bud Light made history last weekend when they dropped $500,000 on turning the little Colorado town of Crested Butte into the mythological city of Whatever, USA for their “Up for Whatever” campaign. It happened. And it ended, as only we could have suspected, as a shitshow.
Bud Light made history last weekend when they dropped $500,000 on turning the little Colorado town of Crested Butte into the mythological city of Whatever, USA for their “Up for Whatever” campaign.
To stoke the party fire, Crested Butte was painted blue, adorned with carefully-selected partygoers who won a contest to go there, and transformed into a 48-hour beer bash where nothing but Bud Light was to be consumed or talked about.
But once the party was over, things started to look less like the end of a crazy weekend and more like the infamous Eagle’s song “Hotel California.”
We’d describe the events that occurred to you, but why do that when the Eagles did it so well?
“Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
"Relax, " said the night man,
"We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave! "
That’s literally what happened.
As the partygoers, whom Bud Light flew in from all over the country, tried to leave Whatever, security stoppages at Crested Butte’s miniature small-plane airport stranded thousands of them. They were suspended in time at the ultimate party, in a fantasy town that didn’t actually exist.
The last of the chartered flights left the airport at 10 p.m. on Sunday, three hours later than scheduled because a glitch in Bud Light’s surely exhaustive TSA pre-screening system (to weed out any cans of Coors), made it so event organizers had to screen thousands of wasted Whatever residents, one-by-one.
“With more than 1,200 consumers attending Whatever, USA, from all points across the country, it takes time to get through a smaller airport," Bud Light spokesman Nick Kelly, said in a statement.
The massive security line created a bottleneck that moved at the pace of rocks growing, and hundreds of people missed their connecting flights out of Whatever.
Naturally, some of the delays were caused by passengers trying to smuggle Colorado’s precious marijuana back to their weed-barren home states. Although, airport officials deny this happening.
Organizers were forced to order delicious pizza and takeout food to feed the crowd, turning the raging party into a raging party one would think about living in forever. And ever.
Some stranded future Whatever, USA inmates even complained of their fate on Twitter:
There's literally 1000 young drunk/hungover kids in this gunnison Colorado airport that's the size of a gas station #chaos #whateverusa
— Taylor Howard (@TheRealTayHow) September 7, 2014
Somewhere, a Bud Light executive smiled. Whatever, USA was about to get a little bigger, and his horde of beer-drinking zombies would surely reproduce to breed future generations of Bud-Light addicted contributions to society.
But in the end, the debaucherous crowd of Whatever citizens eventually succombed to their fate, traveling back to their mediocre lives, silently yearning for Bud Light and days of yesteryear in Whatever, USA.
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