Toyotathon

Submission 34,643

Overview

Toyotathon refers to an annual sale held by the Toyota car company which happens during December and is heavily advertised on television. Online, the event has been joked about as a real holiday conflated with the Christmas season.

Background

According to a newspaper clipping posted by the Butler Toyota dealership,^[1] the first Toyotathon was held in 1969 and lasted 36 hours. The sale later began running during December.

Developments

Online Parodies

In February of 2010, The Daily Show ran a segment titled "Toyotathon of Death," referencing a recent recall of some Toyota cars (shown below).

The Onion^[4] parodied Toyotathon in 2012 in an article titled "Half-Dressed Man Frantically Scrambles Out Of Home After Hearing Toyotathon Deals Won't Last Long." As a meme, people did not begin joking about Toyotathon until 2015. For example, on December 8th, 2015, @fakemikemolloy^[2] tweeted a joke referencing the Starbucks Red Holiday Cup Controversy, gaining over 76 retweets and 144 likes (shown below).

Over the following years during December, jokes about Toyotathon continued to appear. On December 8th, 2016, Twitter user @NoTheOtherJohn joked "hands out cups of water to people during Toyotathon," gaining 2 retweets and 20 likes (shown below, left). Twitter user @gilbertjasono tweeted "[My long-suffering wife scowls at me as it becomes clear that I have once again failed to plan anything to celebrate Toyotathon]" on January 4th, 2017, and gained 27 retweets (shown below, right).

The jokes continued the following year. On December 19th, 2017, Slate^[3] published an article about Toyotathon as a meme, noting that Toyotathon is to the rival sale Hondadays as Christmas is to Hannukah. That year, the most popular Toyotathon tweet was posted by @Jordan_Morris, who tweeted on December 6th "I'm sick of these libs telling me I can't say "Happy Honda Days" because I might offend someone who celebrates Toyotathon. So, I guess I'm supposed to wish everyone a "Happy Winter Car Sale"?", gaining over 53,000 retweets (shown below).