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big week for UK-based memes

A Nightmarish Willy Wonka-Themed Event, And This Week's Other Best Memes, Ranked

Darcy Jimenez
Darcy Jimenez
A Nightmarish Willy Wonka-Themed Event, And This Week's Other Best Memes, Ranked
People online are thoroughly enjoying the viral fiasco that was Glasgow's Willy Wonka experience. The children traumatized by it? Not so much.
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Here at Digg, we try our best to cover the most important and confounding memes that come across the timeline. But the web is littered with tons of great memes that never quite hit the mainstream and instead just bounce around the weird corners of Twitter or Reddit. Enter our recurring feature, Memes, Ranked.

This week, we've got reactions to Wendy's surge pricing, sad hamster TikToks, rumors about Princess Kate's whereabouts and a failed Willy Wonka event that defies explanation.


4. Wendy's surge pricing

The Meme

In what was lining up to be a very memorable One Main Character, news broke (or leaked) that Wendy's was planning on introducing surge pricing for its food, starting in 2025. This experiment of dynamic price increases and decreases based on availability, time and demand is used by Uber and Lyft, but that has more to do with traffic on the road than anything else. So, naturally, after a wild few days of memes and outcry and push-back, Wendy's caved and said this will not be happening after all. But the jokes we shared about turning a fast food chain into the next thing to trade on our Robinhood apps will always be hilarious.

Example


Jared Russo



3. Sad hamster

The Meme

Something of a scourge has taken over TikTok in the last week: very pitiful hamsters. The format of the meme is that the first image portrays someone disapproving of something, while the second is a sad hamster as an avatar of that exact behavior. The meme itself is fine, but we've had to scroll through quite literally hundreds of these. We're very tired.

Examples

bad movies

By sneakybrownnoser.


social media

By nickyycruz.


left and right

By catm_b.


tylenol

By .emsie.


cat blanket

By marmiteandtoastie.


diet coke

By n0t_kaiii.

reversed meme

By: giom778.


Grant Brunner


2. Where is Kate Middleton?

The Meme

As we explained in our previous, well, explainer, people on the internet are currently obsessing over where Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales, is. The British royal had planned abdominal surgery in January, but hasn't been seen in public since — and this realization has sparked a bunch of unhinged memes and conspiracy theories online about what might have happened to her.

Examples


Darcy Jimenez


1. Glasgow's Willy Wonka event

The Meme

Over the weekend, in the Scottish city of Glasgow, an event was held that promised to be an immersive "celebration of chocolate in all its delightful forms." In reality, children were greeted with a sight so dismal — and at times so frightening — that parents ended up calling the police.

The Glasgow Willy Wonka experience is undoubtedly the funniest thing that has happened this year so far, and it gets better with every new photograph and detail that emerges.

From the shoddily decorated warehouse, to the depressed Oompa Loompa working the jellybean stand, to the seemingly AI-generated script that introduced a new and utterly terrifying character called The Unknown into the mix, the fiasco has offered people online an endless supply of meme material.

Examples


Darcy Jimenez



And if you're hungry for more memes, here's the last edition of "The Week's Best Memes,", which featured fake Mandela effects, silly interior design suggestions, potential castings for Sam Mendes's Beatles movies and creative responses to X's spam bot problem.

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