Working “For Free” on Tiktok

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Hello and welcome back to Jarvis Johnson! GOLD, – [disembodied voice] Gooooooold! – The premium channel that is free. Uh. It is. It is free. But, if you’re watching this, you’re premium. And there’s a new trend on TikTok. Surprise, they’re up to something else. We talked about this on my podcast, Sad Boyz,

If you don’t listen, you should. Uh, I do it with my good friend Jordan Adika. We found these TikToks of a girl who goes into stores and she does free labor. She says “oh I worked, I worked from Walmart for 8 hours, and it was awesome. I worked from Target for 8 hours,

And it was- it was sick.” We talked about how you’re kind of cosplaying, you know, working these jobs, which is very insensitive and you’re getting to profit off of this and get all these views, and you know, the people who are actually working this job don’t get to choose what they do

During an 8 hour shift or a, you know, multi-hour shift, maybe they’re working a double. It doesn’t come off the best, though the person probably had the best of intentions. One of my fears, that I mentioned, was that this would become a trend. It’s a chicken or the egg conundrum,

I don’t know who came first, but there is another person who goes and does free labor in establishments that they do not work at. And this person specializes in cleaning the bathroom. And they make TikToks about it. And we’re gonna watch those. I’ve seen one, and whooo-eee.

(laughs) It’s gonna be a good ol’ time. But first, I do want to show you if you have not seen, uh, ugh_madison’s TikToks, I’m gonna give you a little primer on those. – [voiceover] Working at Walmart for free – [Madison] Got here at 2pm and immediately.

– Oh, okay. First pet peeve, of these videos, is that they use the TikTok voiceover while their own talking is happening. And it attacks my senses. (laughs) I can’t- it’s like uh, it scrambles my brain. If you ever wanna like, sort of psychologically attack me,

Play the begi- the first three seconds of one of these TikToks. – [Madison] I was doing such a good job that customers started asking for my help. – [man] Hey lil’ gal can you tell me the price on this? – I don’t know, I don’t work here, I’m sorry.

– [man] Oh I thought you worked here. – (southern accent) “Oh I thought you worked here, judging by all the work you were doing here.” – [Madison] After a couple hours, I worked up an appetite. When I was in line, the girl in front of me didn’t have a credit card,

So she was gonna have to go in a different lane and rescan all her stuff, and I told her not to worry about it and bought it for her. – So, you know, I do believe that Madison- (sighs) I choose to believe, that Madison means well. They, you know, buy people’s groceries,

They give out gift cards to the establishments. I do not think it ends up being helpful content, in my opinion, because of the optics of like, kind of cosplaying a job that a lot of people work these jobs and do not, you know, make ends meet,

They do not earn a living wage from working these jobs and oftentimes they are overworked and are not subjected to the best working conditions. So having someone come in, profit, and build an audience and kind of get a ton of views, I don’t- I don’t think it’s cool. But again I- I can’t-

I don’t think that this person’s evil, and I don’t think that they mean… ill, but I don’t think the content’s helpful. Where I really fell off was in the Target video. – [voiceover] Working at Target for free! – [Madison] I got there at 1pm ready to work.

Again, I have to complain about the first few seconds of the video. This is what I can only describe as a cacophony of- of- of something. A cacophony of voice. – [Madison] The bathroom was really dirty, but don’t worry, I fixed it. – “I fixed it” is objectively hilarious.

The bathroom is dirty but don’t worry I’ll fix it. And we’re gonna look at somebody who entirely focuses on bathrooms, so, don’t- if that’s your- if that’s your thing, then you’re in luck. – [Madison] emptied the trash cans and got Olipop and more gift cards to give to my loyal customers.

– [Woman] Oh thanks, that’s awesome! – [Madison] Employees and security guards kept walking past me, but I blended right in. – I- I’m not gonna go into the whole thing, but I was like- it’s a little odd to specify that you’re giving Olipop to your customers,

And then I realized it’s an Olipop brand deal! That makes it- worse. For a TikTok of this size, for a sort of platform of this size, to do a brand deal like this, you’re getting paid probably thousands of dollars, at least in the low thousands, to who knows the up side.

That then makes it, like, extra bad. Why does it make it extra bad? Because you’re not doing it for free and out of the goodness of your heart, now cynically I’m like, you’re just profiting. You’re profiting more than a person working this job does. For those who don’t know Olipop,

It’s like a probiotic soda or whatever. This reminds me exactly of like, the backlash that Charli D’Amelio got when she like, pretended to work at a Walmart because she was doing some sort of brand deal with them. It’s kind of the same- the same vibe, it’s like cosplaying working a minimum wage job…

Not the best look. I don’t know this person, I don’t know their intentions, and I don’t want to make a statement on the person themselves. Uh, I will say that the content, that’s how it comes off to me. So this is apparently just the beginning of,

I guess you could call like the “free work” or “free labor” trend on TikTok. The focus of this video will actually be someone who I haven’t seen, named “The Clean Girl”. The Clean Girl has almost 600,000 followers. They say “follow and I’ll clean your toilet”.

Me and toilets have a bit of a storied history on this channel. Usually I’m seeing people on TikTok cooking out of them, so this is maybe a welcome change. Just from one look at The Clean Girl’s pinned posts, you can see that she’s getting

Tens of millions of views with some of this stuff, and it doesn’t look like she is always cleaning stores or anything, but I think she saw this trend happening and was like, let me jump on it. And made a video called “I cleaned burger king’s bathroom for free.”

Actually she said “barhroom for free”, which is making me think, especially with the Gabriels video that I just did, people are misspelling stuff in the description to game engagement on TikTok, because I can’t think of another reason that they’re doing this. Um, does anyone know, is that what this is?

Everyone has a typo in their descriptions now. – [Clean Girl] Come with me to clean the Burger King bathroom for free. Within minutes, I was caught. – Okay. (laughs) Okay. Alright. The first thing I noticed, I don’t know anything about The Clean Girl,

But she has perfectly nailed the 5 Minute Crafts voiceover inflection, to the point where I thought it was like AI or something doing the voiceover. And you’ll notice that like, the editing of this is reminiscent of those like, lifehack content farm channels. – [CG] The Burger King bathroom for free.

Within minutes, I was caught cleaning their bathroom. – Also, kind of to that end of like the 5 Minute Crafts-ification of content, I don’t fully understand what sort of like, color grading is happening here, because it looks like- it looks like, so blown out and bright that it’s like CGI.

The saturation is peak. It looks like a fever dream, and it is a fever dream! To me. – [CG] Within minutes I was caught cleaning their bathroom. – “Within minutes I was caught.” (chuckles) Okay yeah, that makes sense. When Alejandro the employee saw my beautiful work,

He immediately left to go get his manager. – I am wondering how you were caught within minutes. I guess you have to keep the door open for ventilation purposes, cause you don’t want to like hot box the fumes of like, the cleaning chemicals, so that’s probably how Alejandro found you.

I do like that she insists on changing her accent for Alejandro. And then I was discovered by (sexily)”Alejandro”. Cue like, Lady Gaga. But before we get into that, we have a brief word from today’s sponsor: Air Up. Air Up is more than just a water bottle.

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Click the link in my description and get started with Air Up today. Thanks to Air Up for sponsoring this video, now back to the video. – [CG] I have so many questions. Is it okay for me to clean here? Or will Alejandro be back to kick me out? I’m so worried.

This is one of the dirtiest Burger King bathrooms – It’s giving… Dora the Explorer. – [CG] I have so many questions. Is it okay for me to clean here? – “Is it okay for me to clean here? Or will Alejandro find me? Will I catch something by not wearing gloves while clean.”

And then she’s just like waiting like Dora the Explorer. [click, beep] “That’s right, I will.” – [CG] This is one of the dirtiest Burger King bathrooms I’ve ever seen. – How many Burger King bathrooms have you seen? (chuckles) how often have you been doing this off-camera? Before, I was like, you know,

With the- the Target girl, I was like, maybe you’re just doing this for the views and the brand deals and stuff, but The Clean Girl, she just goes into- this is her normal- this is her normal routine, is going to a random Burger King and clean it,

And just today she decided to film it. – [CG] Which is wonderful, the dirtier the better. I just hope I have – Okay. I didn’t like the sound of that. “The dirtier, the better!” Relax. (laughs) Okey-dokey dude.

– [CG] I have no idea if I have minutes or hours to get the job done. – Probably minutes. (laughs) If I had to guess, you have minutes. Because one, even if Alejandro appreciates the job you’re doing, people have to go to the bathroom. They can’t just keep turning people away

Because some random woman on TikTok is cleaning it. Like, it’s not scheduled maintenance, you know? Keen observers will have noticed by now, this is a brand deal. This is sponsored content. Which is- it feels like most of TikTok is sponsored content these days, and I’m kind of working on a video about that,

But this is a brand deal with Scrub Daddy, the famous Shark Tank success story, Scrub Daddy, which I love. I’m a- I’m a proud Scrub Daddy myself. But I do think this is a- this a miss for their marketing department. – [CG] But I won’t leave until it’s perfect, like this!

– [Jarvis] That looks like a hamburger bun. That- I, this must be some sort of cleaning supply, but it- that looks like the bottom of a McDonald’s hamburger. Or is that- (laughs) that is 100% a bun! – [CG] leave until it’s perfect. – Okay, so this like uh… this is like engagement bait.

I don’t feel like Burger King would appreciate that, actually. Now that you’re no longer using Scrub Daddy, does Scrub Daddy appreciate that? (chuckles) They- instead of using uh, their product that has sold hundreds of millions of dollars in product, they’re using a- the bottom bun of a Burger King burger?

The king of a burger burger bun? This is 100% engagement bait. Take away the- everything about this, take away all of the context, I can appreciate a good engagement bait when I see one. – [CG] Like this! You can eat off that sink. – “You can eat off that sink.”

I would not. I actually would not eat off that sink. But there is that guy on TikTok who makes like food in the sink. The- remember the guy who, he like cooked in an airplane bathroom, he made like shrimp. What have we done? We have done the wrong thing,

(chuckles) by- by creating a market for some of this content. Where have we- we used to be a proper society, okay? This is- maybe we’ve gone a bridge too far. – [CG] who follows me to do these transformations. And that’s when Alejandro came back. He said he appreciates my work,

But if I don’t leave, he’s gonna call the cops. – ♫ Don’t call the cops ♫ ♫ Don’t call the cops ♫ ♫ Alejandro ♫ I don’t think Alejandro said that. I also think that that was the same clip from talking to Alejandro at the beginning, just reused to tell the story.

But I do think it’s fun. It’s fun that we get a little narrative about, “are they gonna call the cops on me for cleaning the Burger King bathroom?” That’s like a sentence that would harm a Victorian child. This is like the perfect amalgamation of bait content, and it’s working.

I mean this got like, four and a half million views. I, again, can kind of respect it in a vacuum. (chuckles) Which is another cleaning product, I’m sure that the Clean Girl uses. I have to watch- we’ll have to find out. “I was kicked out of Walmart for cleaning their bathroom”

– [CG] Come with me to clean the Walmart bathroom for free. – Why does she do this? I mean, okay wait. All the questions are like, for bait, for comments, for… engagement, like that’s- But what has happened to the- like- there’s like some weird color grading happening here. This doesn’t look natural.

It like, doesn’t feel like my eyes are able to make sense of it. It looks like one of those AI images where like, nothing is exactly right. It’s like, name one thing in this image. – [CG] Within minutes, I was already caught cleaning Walmart’s bathroom. When Rhonda the employee stormed out of the

– Why she gotta name the employees? Why she gotta name ’em like that, huh? They’re just doing their job. Why you gotta put Rhonda on blast, okay? Why you gotta put Alejandro on blast, you know? Let them be. They’re just minding their own business. Trying to work their job.

You’re the one who’s being annoying! (chuckles) Other than the fact that this is probably staged. Oh no, wait, she’s using Rhonda’s real ass name. (laughs) Okay. I can see an “Rh” here. Where do you get off? (laughs) Leave Rhonda alone, use a fake name.

You didn’t need to use Rhonda’s name and face in you TikTok, The Clean Girl. That’s not very clean girl of you, actually. Rhonda was just curious. – [CG] When Rhonda the employee stormed out of the bathroom, – When Rhonda the employee “stormed out” of the bathroom? Okay, alright.

Let’s get a replay of Rhonda’s storming out. Oh, yeah, storming. It looks like she sped up that video! Rhonda was probably moving even slower away. In fact, I would have understood if Rhonda stormed out, cause you’re weird. (laughs) Cause what are you doing??

I would be concerned if two strangers walked into the bathroom and started cleaning, it’s a weird thing that doesn’t happen a lot! So I would ask some questions. She’s a renegade cleaner, she doesn’t follow any of the protocols, you know what I’m saying? She’s the batman of Scrub Daddy.

Let me guess, she’s gonna say, “I didn’t know if I had minutes or hours before they came to stop me, but I had to clean the bathroom, as that is my creed!” – [CG] I had no idea what would happen next. Was it okay for me to clean here, or

– Nooo! No it’s not! Vigilante cleaning is not allowed, alright? – [CG] This was one of the dirtiest bathrooms I had seen in a long time. – Damn. (chuckles) Let them live, dude. Shit, you don’t have to roast their ass, alright? It’s a Walmart, we expect the bathroom to be dirty.

– [CG] This bathroom needed a deep clean, and I had no idea if I had minutes or hours – I knew she was gonna say this! These videos have the same structure! – [security guard] Just wanna know what you’re doing. – I promise you we do clean it. – [Jarvis] Team lead Mark.

Damn dude, she- she doxxed everybody’s ass. She doxxed real-ass Rhonda’s name. I would censor Rhonda’s name, if it weren’t for the fact that I want justice for Rhonda, and I want to be able to say that. Can we get a group of support for Rhonda having to deal with fucking, The Clean Girl?

And fucking, Team- team lead Mark over here, just on call. – [Rhonda] we clean it though. – [CG] And… kicked out. Again. Oh well. – Yeah. “Oh well.” So they kick her out, because they say “We clean it, but we can’t have you clean it, because you don’t work here. ”

And I’m sure there’s some sort of liability that- that Walmart is culpable for if something happens. Also, she’s cleaning it with like no gloves, with like short-shorts on. I don’t know for sure, right. I feel like I would develop some sort of rash. I’m already prone to that,

So I think if I were to clean this in short-shorts, one, the cops would be called even faster, and two, I feel like I would develop some sort of condition. Not even from the dirt, but from all the chemicals! This is like contact dermatitis waiting to happen, dude. And for what.

For a vigilante scrub mommy? Again, not an expert. I feel like maybe inhaling these fumes, especially the radioactive-ass color graded, hyper-saturated TroomTroom-ass fumes you’re breathing, (laughing) feels like it’s a risk. Feels like maybe you should have some sort of mask. Instead of having Scrub Daddy,

She should be sponsored by a fucking Hazmat suit. Please put some protection on, okay? Also, I feel like there have been historically stories of, of cleaning chemicals that have turned into toxins. (laughs) I’m pretty sure that some of the most dangerous chemical weapons that have ever been made by humans

Were uh, cleaning products first. So, how do you not accidentally mix some shit and create- (chuckles) and create a neurotoxin, you know? “Mcdonlads kicked me out.” Okay, that’s fucking hilarious, that’s a hilarious misspelling, McDonlads. – [employee] Cleaning to the bathroom? It’s not permitted for the other people.

– [CG] Do you want to look at it? – [employee] Yeah it’s clean but, I need you to go out of the bathroom, okay? – I just wanted to make this place clean and enjoyable for everyone, and I get kicked out? – Yes. You do get kicked out.

You’re not supposed to be there. Does that help? Does that answer your question? What are these comments? “Why don’t these people have respect, like you walked out of there without a thank you. You’re so nice for dong that and they aren’t even grateful.” No. (laughs) Wrong. Ehh.

This person is making a living off of this shit, they’re doing their content. It’s not like a public good that they’re doing! “You deserve a hero award though. Those big brands just don’t want to be exposed. Don’t feel bad for yourself, you’re doing very great.” I’m not gonna defend McDonald’s by the way,

Who needs no defense, uh, opposite, actually, but I will defend the minimum wage worker who’s working there, just trying to do their fucking job, and then people like this make their jobs harder because they introduce weird variables and situations that they shouldn’t have to deal with.

This feels like an actor from a TroomTroom video escaped the universe that those videos live in, and started like, doing shit in the real world. They like, don’t behave the way that normal people behave. – [CG] Come with me to clean the Taco Bell bathroom for free.

This bathroom is disgusting, which is wonderful. The dirtier the better, if you ask me. – We should do a “dirtier the better” percent speedrun, see how fast- this one we got “dirtier the better” in 8 seconds or less. Everyone said I had to clean a Taco Bell next. Challenge accepted.

But I made a mistake. I forgot to bring enough rags. So I decided to get crafty and use a tortilla. – No. (laughs) Stop it! What are you doing?! How did you get the tortilla, huh? Did you bring that from home, or did you ask the Taco Bell.

This is- this is making Taco Bell look worse. You may be a fine person. I have my doubts, (laughs), but uh, this content is disgusting. – [CG] I heard some employees talking outside the door. I need to hurry up. I don’t know if I have minutes or hours. – Oh, there it is!

Bro, she has dialogue options, dude. This is wild. This is the free space on Clean Girl bingo, is “I don’t know if I have minutes or hours,” “the dirtier the better.” Alright. Well. That’s enough of that. I am sure that some of you will need to “clean girl” your eyeballs after this.

What do we think about this trend? I think it’s just a new version of annoying people at work, which is something I’m, uh, markedly not a fan of, so… I’m gonna say pass. Hard pass on The Clean Girl. Alright, bye everybody.