TACO BELL
FOR SHOWING THE WORLD THAT TACOS ARE A STATE OF MIND
NO ONE REALLY KNOWS who first came up with the idea of Taco Tuesday. One of the earliest references can be found in a newspaper ad for El Paso, Texas's White Star Cafeteria from Monday, October 16, 1933, urging readers to come out and enjoy, ostensibly the next day, three “Mexican tacos” for 15 cents. In the decades that followed, the term began to appear explicitly in ads from Wisconsin to Arizona; in 1973, South Dakota's Snow White Drive In ran an ad in the Rapid City Journal with the line “Stop In on Taco Tuesday.” But it wasn't until 1982 that anyone put a legal stamp on the term. That was the year that Gregory's Restaurant & Bar, in Somers Point, New Jersey, registered it as a trademark in that state. Seven years later, Wyomingbased chain Taco John's claimed the trademark for 49 other states.
Then came May 2023.
That's when Taco Bell filed a petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to cancel the Taco Tuesday trademark across the country, asserting that the commonly used phrase “should be freely available to all who make, sell, eat, and celebrate tacos.” The company launched a Change.org petition and recruited LeBron James—who had long celebrated Taco Tuesday with his family and fans on social media— to be part of a global multimedia ad campaign. (James himself had even tried to trademark the phrase in 2019 so he could use it across podcasts and other media projects.)
The move—in which a gorditosize brand took legal action against microscopic competitors, mainly for kicks and publicity—could have backfired. This is America's fourth-biggest fast-food chain, after all, with about $14 billion in annual sales across 7,200 restaurants. It risked being seen as a bully. Instead, the ad campaign drove more than 21 billion media impressions in just a few months, and succeeded. Taco John's
