Mercadona: The Unstoppable Machine Turning Snack Hype Into Spain’s Cheapest Entertainment
Hello everyone. Let’s talk about Mercadona — no, scratch that — let’s talk about the absurd phenomenon that is Mercadona content in 2025. Once upon a time, supermarkets were for, you know, buying food you eat and shampoo you use. Now? Mercadona is basically running an unpaid influencer empire without lifting a manicured corporate finger. Marvelous, isn’t it? We’ve reached the point where a €1.50 product launch is getting treated like a triple-A game release, and your average TikTok wanderer is frothing at the mouth to “unlock” a packet of crisps that taste vaguely like burnt crust. Congratulations, you’ve completed the tutorial level of the supermarket hype game.
The Dopamine-Dispensing Grocery Aisle
Here’s the deal. The mechanics are idiot-proof: load up a shelf with something mildly quirky, wait for someone on TikTok to “discover” it like Indiana Jones coming across the Lost Ark, and then watch as the clickbait armies flood the internet. Media outlets? Oh, they’re not getting paid for promoting these products — they’re too busy chasing the golden goose of web traffic. It’s not advertising, oh no, don’t you dare call it that. It’s “journalism of service,” which apparently means spoon-feeding the audience microdoses of novelty that keep them scrolling like rats in a Skinner box. And just like that, corporate coffers remain untouched while public attention does all the heavy lifting.
Gamifying the Weekly Shop
Gamification, my dear patients, is the disease here — and Mercadona is patient zero. Your average shopper now walks into store aisles as though they’ve dropped into the open world section of a game. Finding “the TikTok item” is the new national sport — less Spain’s La Liga, more “Limited Time Snack Quest.” Product hunting has been transformed into a low-cost, low-reward questline where you unlock patatas sabor pizza instead of legendary loot. The dopamine payoff? About as short-lived as a free-to-play daily login bonus — blink and you’ll miss it, but hey, come back tomorrow, adventurer.
The Free Workforce: Influencers on Tap
Mercadona has somehow engineered an army of unpaid brand evangelists. This includes everyone from the nutritionist doing forensic bread analysis, to the mechanic showing off industrial uses for hair spray, to the tiktoker sniffing gels like a sommelier with a scalp problem. Each of them believes they’re doing society a favour — and perhaps they are, assuming your definition of public service involves discovering that a knock-off shower gel smells like Dior for €2.50. Meanwhile, the company’s CEO can sit back, sip his espresso, and watch the product placement machine churn without signing a single influencer cheque. A true endgame boss move.
Luxury Distilled to Discount Brand
This is the consumer Stockholm syndrome of our times. Real luxury has been priced out of reach for most — no Michelin, no Maldives — so the middle class mainlines tiny thrills from bargain-bin brand extensions instead. A strawberry ice cream that’s “going viral” is the food-world equivalent of finding an epic mount in the tutorial zone: thrilling for a minute, ultimately useless in high-level play. The irony? We all keep queueing up for the same cheap rush, convincing ourselves that these white-label miracles are our ticket to joy. They aren’t. They’re merchandising loot boxes, and the house always wins.
Conclusion: Snack Hype Fatigue
So where does that leave us? In a world where a supermarket hauls in massive cultural capital without spending an ad-cent, while the rest of us chase trivial consumer highs like NPCs on an endless fetch quest. Yes, it’s clever. Yes, it’s kind of impressive. But it’s also deeply unfulfilling — the sugar rush without the nutritional value, the boss fight without the loot drop. My prescription? Rediscover actual experiences — or at the very least, stop pretending that patatas sabor pizza are a revolution worth chronicling. The hype treadmill spins on, powered entirely by the people running on it.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is entirely my opinion.
Source: Mercadona ya no es solo un supermercado: se ha convertido en la plataforma de entretenimiento más barata de España, https://www.xataka.com/magnet/mercadona-no-solo-supermercado-se-ha-convertido-plataforma-entretenimiento-barata-espana
