Recently, the local burger chain Tropical Hut trended on twitter. It is one the oldest local fast food chains in the Philippines. Unfortunately, unlike its competitor Jollibee, and the multi-national Mc Donald’s, they fell off in popularity. They only have a few remaining branches in Metro Manila, that are still surviving despite the competition and of course the pandemic.
The tweet that started the trend was posted on June 12 (Philippine Independence day). On that tweet, the author stated that he dined in at a Tropical Hut branch, and he is their only customer. Despite the pandemic “restrictions”, commercial activity on malls and fast food chains are pretty much back to “normal”, so having only one customer is disheartening. The tweet included a photo of the branch which has shown that it’s aesthetic was really left behind in the 90’s-2000’s era. Most of its competitors have refurbished/modernized the look of their restaurants in the recent years.
I guess the photo really activated the nostalgia of twitter uses who reminisced dining in the fast food joint years ago. For me personally, I think I only dined in there once, when I was a kid. Their branch near our home closed down more than a decade ago. The trend resulted into a surge of orders both for dine in and delivery that really shocked the staff (as stated in the tweets).
I wanted to look into the trend further, so I studied how to scrape tweets using the snscraper library. There are only about 8000 public tweets since Jan 2022 until Jun 2022 (when the trend happened) so the scraping process was quick. My basic analysis can be seen on the embeded jupyter notebook below.
