World Cup fans aren’t discovering that Americans are excessive or gluttonous, as they were told. They’re discovering what an economy looks like when it’s allowed to optimize for the consumer.
The World Cup kicked off this week, and over the next month, fans from around the world will crisscross the United States following their teams. They came for the football, but judging by what’s going viral online, they care just as much about America itself.
Scroll through the social media posts and you’ll find Scots stunned that a gas station can be a destination, as Buc-ee’s, which Tennesseans know well from its Sevierville and Crossville locations, has become an unlikely star of the tournament. A German fan’s late-night photos, captioned, “THIS IS A GAS STATION,” has pulled in over 23 million views so far. Days earlier, the same fan wandered into a Bass Pro Shops and reported, half in disbelief, that there was a shooting range inside the store.
You’ll find videos of Italians marveling at free soda refills, a practice France literally banned in 2017. And a Swedish influencer amazed by ranch sauce and in-flight Wi-Fi faster than their home broadband posted, “the USA has completely radicalised me within 48 hours.”
It isn’t just Europeans. A Japanese traveler went viral recommending Waymo’s driverless taxis as World Cup transport in Dallas, Houston and Los Angeles. You can hail one from an app, he noted, without speaking a word of English – a service that, outside a handful of American cities, exists almost nowhere in the world.
Americans, for their part, are eating it up: One sports anchor marveled that her entire feed had become “European tourists discovering (and loving) Taco Bell, Buc-ee’s, BBQ, SEC stadiums and more Americana… a level of joy and positivity I’ve never seen on this app.”
An economy that ‘optimizes for the consumer’
I recognize the wide-eyed tone of those posts, because that was me not long ago. Less than a year ago, I moved from Milan to Nashville after more than a decade in the consumer environment that Brussels insists is the gold standard of the world. The culture shock these fans are feeling is real – I still feel it myself – partly because Europeans are fed a constant diet of propaganda downplaying the American way of life. Now millions of them are seeing it with their own eyes, and they’re asking why none of it is available back home.
The air conditioning, the mega grocery stores with a sushi counter and a pharmacy open at ten o’clock at night, the same-day delivery of nearly everything – none of this is an accident of culture. It’s what happens when businesses are broadly free to compete for customers on convenience, and energy is cheap enough that no one treats refrigeration as a luxury. Visitors aren’t discovering that Americans are excessive or gluttonous, as they were told. They’re discovering what an economy looks like when it’s allowed to optimize for the consumer.
Some discoveries should embarrass European policymakers outright. The fan riding a Waymo this month goes home to a country where the service doesn’t exist, in part because Europe’s regulatory machinery moves at the speed of committee. The fan with an iPhone learned that Apple’s AI features arrived in the EU more than a year late – Apple explicitly blamed the EU’s Digital Markets Act – and that the next generation of AI-powered Siri now faces the same fog. Brussels claims it is protecting Europeans from the risks of these products. In reality, it is preventing Europeans from having them at all.
The perils of European regulation
Here’s the concession my European friends deserve: Some things in Europe are genuinely better. Internet and mobile data cost less, most cities are a train ride away and small local stores still exist and still serve their neighborhoods. Europe’s eating culture is healthier, too. But the standard rebuttal – that European regulation makes food safer and people healthier – is mostly wrong on the mechanics.
The famous “chlorinated chicken” panic? The EU’s own food safety authority found pathogen-reduction rinses pose no risk to consumers; the ban is a trade objection dressed up as a safety standard. The viral lists of “ingredients banned in Europe” mostly compare a system that bans anything that could conceivably cause harm at any dose with one that asks whether real-world exposure actually does. And the health gap between Americans and Europeans, which is real, tracks lifestyle and car dependence far more than any food directive.
So to every European fan posting an astonished thread between matches: Welcome, enjoy the brisket and share what you’ve seen – because despite the bureaucrats’ best efforts to devalue the American way, all of this was built by free companies serving free people.
Which raises the question: What, exactly, is your regulator protecting you from?
The football will be decided on the field. The consumer question already has a winner.
