For the past six months, I have been tormented by beans.
Since the end of January, I have received around 50 voicemails, all from different phone numbers, all asking me the same question with the same grating affect: “Y’all got any beans?”
During one stretch in April, I got no less than 20 calls in a week, all from different numbers. During a three-week reprieve this summer, I thought I was unshackled from this albatross. Alas, they restarted in earnest in August; this week alone, I’ve received four.
It is truly a surreal experience to be at the movies, or on a date, or out of town, and receive yet another five-second inquiry about my legume possession.
The origin of this prank is a Mr. Beast video from 2019 in which he leaves four friends in an “insane asylum” — his words, not mine — for 24 hours straight. Two minutes into the sixteen-minute clip, one character says the dreaded phrase: “Y’all got any beans?” (I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that that individual recently was accused of grooming, which is, uh, not great. The accusation has also opened up an entire can of Mr. Beast-related worms about transphobia, YouTuber exploitation, and countless other issues that are much too weighty to get into here.)
Somewhere in the bowels of the hell internet, youths decided this was fodder for an excellent prank. I was infected in October 2021, when some TikToker had the ingenious idea to start hitting a San Jose location of Buffalo Wild Wings. “Call this buffalo wild wings and ask for just beans they get soooo mad,” read the video, now seemingly scrubbed from TikTok. It amassed millions of views.
I was, at the time, a reporter at an SEO-driven local news site. My task was to write an absurd number of stories, feeding endless content into the content slot machine in the hopes of gaining some traction on Google. I figured local angle + internet prank = sweet, sweet traffic.
For better or worse, the beans story hit. If you Google “beans prank,” it’s still the sixth entry, and the first that isn’t from YouTube, Reddit, or Instagram. The ‘prank’ extended to their Google Reviews: A month after the story ran, a poster claiming to be Buffalo Wild Wings referenced my article in a plea to get the many beans-related reviews taken down, on the grounds that the San Jose location doesn’t actually serve beans. (It didn’t work — at least 744 of the 2,402 reviews for the restaurant still mention the word “beans.”)
Why this prank was resuscitated three years after I published the story, I’ll truly never know. A hunch: A Facebook engagement-bait account resurfaced the original ask in a March post, this time to torment a Buffalo Wild Wings in Vegas. I’ve tried texting the numbers; one responded, and we had a conversation that resulted in increasingly absurd non-sequitur responses as I tried to ask more questions. “naw i just got bored omw to school n js asked people for beans,” this person texted, in perhaps one of their only earnest responses back to me. “trust me i called like 100 people that day.”
Out of morbid curiosity, I called up the San Jose Buffalo Wild Wings earlier this week, to see if they, too, had been dealing with a resurgence. A worker named Jeremy sighed when I asked him. The location has received at least three to four calls a day, he told me. Most of the time, he hangs up, but on occasion, he’ll play ball.
“Sometimes it’s just, ‘no, we don’t have any beans,’” Jeremy said. “Or, like, ‘What are you doing with your life?’”
I don’t know if these calls will ever end, for myself or for Jeremy and the other long-suffering employees at that B-Dubs. It seems entirely possible this particular prank could be passed down through generations of middle school boys with internet connections and places to gather, be it Discord or Telegram or wherever they go next.
In writing this article, I fully expect to Streisand effect myself. So, let’s set the record straight: I do, in fact, have beans. Chickpeas are a pretty good source of protein.
