For Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, a quick Walmart run can turn into crowd control training. He explained why on the January 15 episode of Steve-O’s Wild Ride! Podcast, laying out the rules he lives by when fans want photos. Break one rule and things spiral fast.
Donaldson, 27, didn’t sugarcoat it. “If someone asks you for a photo and you go yes and then you let them hand the phone to their mom, you’re cooked,” he told Steve-O. “It’s like a f**** flare in the middle of Walmart for everyone to start lining up, just ruining our trip.” You can picture it. One pause. One phone handoff. Heads turn. A line appears out of nowhere.
That’s the real issue. With hundreds of millions of subscribers across his channels, time matters. Seconds matter. “You have to understand, it’s a death sentence if it’s not quick because, again, when you take photos in public, it causes everyone to turn and look, and lines form, and then it just gets bad because once a line forms, people just want a photo because other people are getting a photo,” he said. Monkey see, monkey queue.
Sometimes stores pay the price. “I’ve literally been kicked out of a Walmart because of it,” Donaldson admitted. Not for being rude. For being too recognizable.
He’s clear about that part. “We like our fans and we’re not pieces of s*** it’s just a factual thing,” he explained. “If we don’t take it quick enough, things just go bad and it’s something that’s very hard to understand, but you’ve just got to take our words for it.” Translation. Chaos isn’t personal. It’s math.
So he built a system. MrBeast holds the phone, snaps the pic, hands it back, moves on. Clean. Fast. He’s taken between 2,000 and 4,000 photos in a single day this way. That’s not a flex. That’s survival. “It really makes a difference because then those people leave and they’re like, ‘Holy s***, that was a really cool experience,’ as opposed to just like, ‘Oh, it was whatever,’” he said.
You know him for counting to 100,000, giving away stacks of cash, and turning YouTube into something closer to TV. You might know Feastables from store shelves or Beast Philanthropy from projects that fund wells, cataract surgeries, and food aid. All of that brings attention. Lots of it.
Meeting fans sounds fun until you’re standing in aisle seven watching a crowd form around cereal boxes. Control the moment or get escorted out. That’s the reality when fame follows you to Walmart.
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