IHOP Renames Itself Yet Again to OURHOB

To promote their new “Comrade Bread” menu item, IHOP has now christened itself Our Unitary House of Bread (OURHOB for short). Unlike the infamous “IHOB” publicity stunt pulled off earlier this year, this new name change is said to be permanent.

Last week, The Spectator News field reporters sat down for an interview with now-OURHOB CEO Julia Stewart and President Darren Rebelez to get inside information on this revolutionary decision, from the reason for their sudden demographic shift to the thought process behind their controversial “Starving Citizen” advertising campaign.

“Our team was struggling to figure out what to do with the 50 metric tons of burger buns we had left in stock.” Stewart responded. “Everyone was shooting ideas, but none of them were good. We had ideas like smashing the buns into pancake shapes and marketing them as ‘salty pancakes,’ and one intern even suggested donating our supply to a homeless shelter. Utter nonsense. Who in their right mind would ever donate food to someone?”

“It took an awful lot of thinking,” Rebelez said. “But as I thought about donating food, I realized that people are suckers when it came to free stuff. So to solve our crisis, we created the Starving Citizen campaign. With this strategy, we made everything free as long as the customer was willing to do some intensive manual labor. If they fail to meet our lenient ‘slice-per-bun’ customer production quota, we simply shackle them into a kitchen assembly line and work them until they either die or produce at least quadruple their original order. One of the interns claimed we were turning our restaurant franchisees into miniature collectives, but I like to see it more as progressive thinking: by removing the paying part of our company and making every customer work for their food, we’re fighting against the corrupt capitalist system! After all, why should it be about ‘I’ when it’s ‘OUR’ Unitary House of Bread?”

Under the new system, the bread will be advertised similarly to their seasonal “endless pancake” deals, but with some major adjustments in decor and food distribution—namely, the replacement of their original smiley-face logo with a yellow sickle and a red background. Once they enter the restaurant, patrons will be guided to already-occupied tables and crammed in with the then-healthy customers until said tables are filled to three times the legal limit. Customers order food and spin a wheel to be placed in a labor site. Once they finish their task, “volunteers” are allowed to eat the crust off of one burger bun before the rest of their products are shipped back and resold in frozen food aisles as OURHOB-brand French toast. This way, the multi-million dollar conglomerate can continue to exploit more slave labor without fear of government backlash.

This strategy has received mixed reviews from the public.

“This is the best thing that has happened to me since I discovered Communism itself last year,” junior Steve Wang said. “Who cares if people get threatened at gunpoint for free food? It’s still free!”

“I don’t care if it’s free! The bread is terrible,” junior Ruby Huang commented. “Not only does it look like a hastily drawn math teacher Aziz Jumash[a], but the bread’s also harder than his tests. I mean, what the heck?”

With its updated image, OURHOB has continued to generate profit at an alarming rate and is currently trying to expand its services to Moscow.

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