Jaime told me that 1 in 6 Americans lives in California. That’s a lot of people, which is probably a big part of why California is a McDonald’s test market for their new Angus burgers. I live in Minnesota, which I don’t think has ever been a test market for anything since the great McLutefisk debacle of ’84.

Having never lived in a test market, I’m unfamiliar with how these things are usually handled – I assumed it was pretty much the same sort of marketing campaign we get whenever a fast food chain launches a new product. “Come on in and try the new Might Moo Burger!”. This is not the case, at least not when it comes to the new Angus burger at McDonald’s.

Instead, McDonald’s launched a campaign entreating Californians to get out and try an Angus burger so that people in other parts of the country would be able to one day enjoy an Angus burger. Yes, the fate of the Angus burger loving country is in the hands of those finicky Californians, many of whom are rumored to be vegetarians.

There were two commercials that I saw/heard for this campaign. One was a TV commercial in which people from what I assume was New York told Californians, in their best mafia voices, to yo, go eat an Angus burger. And if they were thinking about not eating an Angus burger? Fogetaboudit.

This commercial might irk those on the East Coast, but they have nothing to fuss about compared to the commercial we heard on the radio that directly mocked our home state of Minnesota.

I’ve done a brief Google search for the ad and couldn’t find it, so unfortunately I’m going to have to try my best to paraphrase and recreate it for you here. Some of the details may be slightly off, but this is close to how it went:

Ole: Hey there then California, we’re here in Minnysooda and oofdah we’d shore like it if you’d try one a them new Angus burgers they got now at da McDonald’s.

Lena: Ooh, Ole. I heard about dose, don’cha know? I think Elmer got to try one when he was on vacation out dere in California. He thought it was mighty tasty. I shore hope we get to try them here someday then.

It goes on like this for awhile. In the end, they drag in something about the wacky Minnesotans thinking they saw aliens or some shit like that.

So, the next time you hear someone from California refer to us as a bunch of hillbillies who talk like retards and live in a fly-over state and think airplanes are UFOs, well, you can thank McDonald’s for reinforcing that mental image of our state.

Oh, and by the way, I realize that might, in fact, describe outstate Minnesotans, but most of us in the metro have a full set of teeth and have had electricity and running water for several years now.