A resurfaced podcast clip is putting YouTube star MrBeast back under scrutiny after he said he secretly placed GoPros inside Walmart stores to figure out why his Feastables chocolate bars were breaking on shelves.
What happened?
According to The International Business Times UK, the renewed criticism stems from remarks Jimmy Donaldson, known online as MrBeast, made on The Diary Of A CEO, a podcast hosted by Steven Bartlett.
Donaldson said his first idea was to review Walmart's own surveillance footage to trace what was happening to the product displays.
"I tried to get Walmart to give me the security camera footage and they wouldn't," he said.
After that, he said, he hired people to conceal GoPros in bags of Lay's chips near Feastables setups at multiple Walmart locations. He said the recordings captured shoppers handling the bars and the display boxes repeatedly leaning over or dropping.
"It would just happen over and over and over again because we didn't engineer the boxes correctly," he said.
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Why does it matter?
The idea of a company secretly filming customers during ordinary shopping trips without telling them has angered people online.
Shoppers usually assume any cameras in a store belong to the retailer's security system, not to a brand informally monitoring its shelf displays.
One X user wrote, "Hey @Walmart this is horrific behavior and I now feel violated and unsafe at the idea of shopping in any of your locations again. This must be immediately addressed."
This story is another example of a rich entrepreneur pushing past ethical boundaries in the name of optimization and framing it as innovation instead of a privacy violation.
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What is MrBeast saying?
By Donaldson's own account, the problem turned out to be the way the boxes were made and displayed, rather than anything unusual about the customers.
He also brushed off concerns about whether the tactic was legal.
"The amount of people who tried to tell me that was illegal," Donaldson said in the clip, before adding, "I don't f****** care. I just need to know why my bars are breaking."
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