About

Corporations Throwing Pizza Parties refers to a series of memes about corporations, companies, management and HR choosing to stimulate employees with pizza parties and give employees gifts instead of increasing their salaries and giving bonuses. The notion of pizza parties and similar non-monetary stimulation being a distraction achieved virality in the early 2020s, spawning memes and humorous posts critical of the practice.

Origin

On January 31st, 2019, Redditor I_aint_that_dude posted the earliest discovered meme making fun of corporations throwing pizza parties as a reward for hardworking employees to the /r/rmeirl^[1] subreddit. The Drowning High Five meme received over 33,100 upvotes in five years and has been widely circulated online since (shown below).

Spread

The notion of management and corporations using pizza parties as a tactic of distracting employees from issues such as inadequate compensation saw further spread on social media in the early 2020s. For example, on June 30th, 2021, Gravity Payments CEO wrote, "How come CEOs get million-dollar bonuses for reaching their goals while workers get a pizza party?" The post (shown below, left) received over 5,400 reposts and 30,000 likes on X^[2] in three years.

On October 7th, 2022, X^[3] user @rineplaysgames made a post with a similar joke about pizza parties that received over 370 reposts and 18,000 likes in one year (shown below, right).

At the same time, multiple articles and blog posts critical of the efficacy and ethicality of pizza parties appeared on Medium,^[4] Substack^[5] and other platforms in the early 2020s.

In 2023, several image caption memes critical of the practice went viral online. For example, on September 29th, 2023, X^[6] user @CramerTracker made a post that received over 20,000 reposts and 133,000 likes in four months (shown below, left). On December 6th, Facebook^[7] user Kevin Oxford posted an AI-generated meme that received over 4,400 reactions and 25,000 shares in two months (shown below, right).

Various Examples

https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/7260601215686282542

https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/7332639164329938218

Search Interest

External References