The Day a Number Broke a Burger Chain

Picture this: It’s a normal evening at In-N-Out. Fries are frying, milkshakes are shaking, adults are trying to keep their cholesterol and children under control.

Then the cashier calls out, “Order sixty-seven!” Every kid in the place detonates.

“Six seven!”

Chants, hand gestures, phones up, chaos. The restaurant turns into a live TikTok comment section. Staff can’t hear, customers can’t order, and some poor manager who thought their biggest problem today was running out of spread is suddenly doing crowd control because of a number.

In-N-Out quietly does the most 2025 thing imaginable: it deletes 67 from reality. Orders now jump from 66 to 68, just like they already sidestep 69. Employees have confirmed it, local news has confirmed it, and a depressing number of videos have confirmed it. 

This isn’t about burgers. It’s about a generation of kids who can turn two syllables into a real-world denial-of-service attack. And about adults who are sitting in HR panels asking, very calmly, if the future workforce is going to be able to function when they can’t get through lunch without screaming at an order number.

Welcome to Gen Alpha, where the in-group password is “six seven,” the vibe is “brain rot but make it social,” and everyone over thirty is somewhere between “mildly amused” and “genuinely alarmed.”

What “6-7” Actually Is (And Isn’t)

Let’s start with the obvious question: what does 6-7 mean?

Short answer: absolutely nothing. Longer answer: absolutely nothing, very efficiently.

The now-omnipresent chant traces back to “Doot Doot (6 7),” a drill track by Philadelphia rapper Skrilla. The phrase “six seven” appears as a repeated hook with no clear explanation, but it was quickly glued to basketball edits of LaMelo Ball, who happens to be 6’7”. Those clips took off on TikTok and Reels, turning “six seven” into a meme sound rather than a coherent idea. 

Then came the “67 Kid,” a boy filmed shouting “67!” with an exaggerated gesture at a basketball game, which gave the meme a mascot and a hand motion. From there, it spread into everything. Tests scored 67%. Rankings at 67th place. Any accidental “sixty-seven” in a sentence. If you can find a 6 and a 7 near each other, congratulations, you’ve unlocked content. 

By late 2025, the thing had mutated so far that Dictionary.com named “67” its 2025 Word of the Year. Not a metaphor. Not a clever portmanteau. Not some deep cultural keyword. Just: 67. A nonsense interjection. A pure inside joke elevated to “word of the year” status because it was so pervasive, so context-free, and so relentlessly screamed by children that lexicographers had to acknowledge it. 

That’s the punchline: 6-7 is engineered nonsense. It doesn’t stand for a secret meaning. It stands for the fact that nothing needs meaning anymore if it has enough repetition, reaction videos, and a hook you can yell across a burger joint.

From Harmless Chant to “Brain Rot”

So, why does this particular nonsense feel different from, say, dabbing, bottle flipping, or yelling “Bazinga!” at the worst possible time?

Because 6-7 is not just a meme. It’s a perfectly crystallized specimen of what kids themselves now call “brain rot.”

“Brain rot” is the term teens and tweens use for the endless stream of low-effort, high-stimulation content that trains their brains to crave quick hits instead of sustained attention. Academic work is starting to take that language seriously. Researchers describe how rapid-fire, ultra-short videos and constant scrolling fragment attention, reduce deep engagement, and replace sustained focus with a rolling slot machine of tiny dopamine hits. 

The 6-7 meme fits that pattern perfectly.

It’s short. It’s loud. It’s easy to recognize. It’s easy to repeat. It has a ritual gesture. And its entire purpose is to hijack the moment. It doesn’t communicate information; it replaces whatever was happening with itself. Class discussion? Now it’s 6-7. Church service? 6-7. Your burger order? 6-7. Parents, teachers, even a sitting vice president have publicly complained about kids chanting it in situations where adults naïvely thought attention still belonged to them. 

When In-N-Out pulled order 67, it wasn’t just reacting to noise. It was acknowledging that the meme had turned its stores into a stage set. The restaurant was no longer a place where teens sometimes filmed content; it was content. That’s a subtle but important shift.

And it’s not happening in isolation.

It’s Not Just Burgers: Sephora Kids, Devious Licks, and Italian Brain Rot

If 6-7 was the only thing Gen Alpha was doing, you could dismiss it as a weird little generational in-joke. But it sits within a growing family of behaviors in which kids use the real world as a backdrop to feed algorithmic gods.

You’ve got “Sephora Kids,” pre-teens flooding beauty stores, annihilating testers, mixing high-end skincare into “skincare smoothies,” and treating staff like NPCs in a shopping-mall RPG—all while filming everything for TikTok. Retail employees and journalists report ruined displays, harassed workers, and whole sections of stores turned into content farms for ten-year-olds obsessed with Drunk Elephant serums and viral “must-have routines.” 

You’ve got the older sibling of all this, the Gen Z “devious licks” challenge, where students filmed themselves stealing and destroying school property—soap dispensers, toilets, even turf from sports fields—just to one-up each other on TikTok until police and school districts had to step in. 

And you’ve now got fully AI-generated “Italian Brain Rot”: surreal characters like a ballerina with a cappuccino teacup for a head and a shark in sneakers, singing in fake Italian while kids loop the videos on TikTok and recreate them on Roblox. These AI-assisted fever dreams rack up tens of millions of views and spill out into toys, live events, and merch, turning pure nonsense into a monetized franchise. 

6-7 is a cousin to all of this. It’s part of a broader pattern where kids are:

Not just consuming content.

Not just making content.

But converting everyday spaces—schools, malls, fast-food counters—into props for the algorithm. The behavior looks “stupid” from the outside. Inside the logic of the feed, it’s efficient.

Gen Alpha’s “Stupid” Tricks Are Doing Serious Social Work

Here’s the inconvenient thing psychiatrists and linguists keep pointing out: you can’t understand these trends if you assume kids are idiots. You have to assume they are extremely good at something—just not necessarily something you value.

In the case of 6-7, that “something” is social engineering.

The chant is a shibboleth. Say it, and you signal you’re part of the in-group that understands the reference. Don’t say it—or worse, ask what it means—and you instantly expose yourself as an outsider: a teacher, a parent, a confused Gen X recruiter at a Manhattan HR event. Linguists use words like “in-group marker” and “social password,” but the function is straightforward: this is how kids find each other in hostile or boring environments. 

On top of that, 6-7 is a toy for power.

Classrooms, churches, fast-food chains, even your carefully planned panel discussion are spaces where kids have very little control. But if two random syllables plus a hand motion can derail an entire room, suddenly they can bend the environment, at least for a moment. That hits like a power-up in a world where adults control schedules, grades, money, and rules.

Does that make the behavior less annoying? No. Does it make it more understandable? Absolutely. Kids have always done this. We just didn’t have high-resolution video, algorithmic amplification, and a global comment section for your sixth-grade inside joke.

The Part That Actually Is Scary

If you’re worried about Gen Alpha, you’re not hallucinating. You’re just probably worried about the wrong thing.

The red flag isn’t that they chant 6-7. It’s the environment that makes something like 6-7 feel necessary, inevitable, and impossible to turn off.

Early research on Gen Alpha is brutally consistent. Parents and experts report heavy screen exposure from very young ages, with at least three out of four parents worried about how digital media affects attention span, mental health, and exposure to sexual or violent content.  Studies of this cohort describe “digital dependency,” rising anxiety, and social isolation as kids spend more time in online spaces and less in unstructured, offline play. 

At the same time, broader adolescent studies show that what really correlates with serious mental-health risk isn’t just screen time, it’s addictive, compulsive use—kids who feel distressed when separated from their devices and whose online behavior interferes with sleep, school, and relationships. Those teens show significantly higher rates of suicidal ideation and self-harm. 

In that context, “brain rot” memes like 6-7 start to look less like harmless silliness and more like a visible symptom of an underlying attention economy that never lets kids’ brains rest. They’re not just choosing nonsense. They’re being marinated in it.

Meanwhile, Gen Z Isn’t Lazy – They’re Opting Out of Our Hype Machine

A lot of the panic about Gen Alpha gets projected through resentment of Gen Z. At every panel, someone eventually says a version of:

“They don’t want to work hard, they want as much money as their parents, they only watch summaries, they don’t have the patience for a full movie.”

It feels true if your only data source is your own annoyance. It looks different when you pull actual numbers.

Surveys show Gen Z overwhelmingly prefers short-form content—around 60 percent say they favor short videos and quick visual summaries as their default.  But the same research also finds that most of them still regularly watch full-length TV and movies; they haven’t abandoned long-form, they’ve just layered fast, mobile-first content on top of it. 

In the workplace, data keeps undermining the “lazy” stereotype. Studies on the “anti-hustle” ethos show Gen Z isn’t rejecting hard work; they’re rejecting burnout as a lifestyle, pushing for boundaries, flexibility, and mental-health protection instead of 80-hour weeks rewarded with pizza and layoffs. 

They will leave on time. They will quit toxic jobs. They will demand more pay if you expect them to live at the office. That isn’t a refusal to work; it’s a refusal to play a game they’ve watched older generations lose. Gen Alpha is watching all of this.

They’re seeing their slightly older cousins say “no” to hustle culture, “no” to unpaid loyalty, and “no” to sitting still through anything that doesn’t at least pretend to be interactive. That doesn’t mean they’ll copy-paste all of Gen Z’s choices. But it does mean that when you look at a restaurant full of kids screaming 6-7, you’re not seeing a random generational glitch. You’re seeing the next iteration of a long negotiation around attention, effort, and what is actually worth caring about.

The Algorithm Is Raising Your Kids (And It Likes Noise)

Here’s where this loops back into the world of AI and chatbots. Because behind all of this—67 chants, Sephora stampedes, Italian brain-rot cartoons—there is code.

Recommendation engines on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Reels are optimized for engagement: watch time, likes, comments, shares, replays, duets. They don’t care if the content is meaningful, educational, or even coherent. They care that it keeps eyes on screens and fingers scrolling.

Generative AI is now feeding that machine with surreal characters, synthetic voices, and infinite remix potential. Italian Brain Rot didn’t need a writers’ room; it needed an AI that could spit out endless variations of “vaguely Italian nonsense with a cursed little song” until one hit big. 

Once a pattern starts to perform—whether it’s 6-7, a skincare haul, or a Roblox game about stealing brain-rot characters—the system amplifies it. Kids who are already bored, anxious, or lonely are rewarded for leaning into the thing that gets the biggest reaction.

Shout 6-7 quietly at home? No views.

Shout 6-7 in a classroom? Some laughs.

Shout 6-7 with thirty friends in a burger joint while staff looks overwhelmed and other customers film it? Viral potential unlocked.

The algorithm doesn’t see “respect for public space.” It sees an energetic crowd and lots of phones held vertical. And it says: more of that. So no, Gen Alpha is not uniquely stupid. They’re hyper-adapted to an environment that rewards noise, disruption, and instantly recognizable memes over context, nuance, or patience. We built that environment. Then we handed them phones.

So What Do We Do With a Generation That Screams Numbers?

If you’re secretly hoping 6-7 is the peak of the nonsense, and it will all calm down from here, I have bad news. This is the beta version. As AI tools get better at spitting out kid-bait characters, songs, and micro-memes, you’re going to see more of this, not less. Numbers that become cult passwords. Phrases that mean nothing but travel everywhere. Physical spaces turned into stage sets for the feed. The question is not “How do we make kids stop doing stupid memes?” The question is, “How do we make the environment less dependent on stupid memes to feel tolerable?”

That means, less moral panic over the specific meme of the month, more attention to the systems that reward compulsive, addictive use. Less “kids these days are broken,” more “why did we decide their entire social life should run on engagement metrics?” Less sneering at Gen Z for rejecting hustle, more serious effort to offer work and education that aren’t designed around burnout and boredom.

Gen Alpha is not doomed. Many of these kids are also coding, editing videos, organizing climate strikes, and talking about mental health in ways older generations never dared. The same brains that can memorize every beat of an AI-generated nonsense song can also learn to recognize manipulation and demand better tools.  But that only happens if adults stop treating 6-7 as proof of irreversible decline and start treating it as what it really is: a very loud, very annoying, very efficient error message from the culture we built around them.

In-N-Out can delete 67 from the ticket system. Parents can ban the word at home. Schools can outlaw the gesture in classrooms. Governments can argue about bans and age gates and “online safety.”

None of that changes the fact that somewhere, right now, another AI-boosted in-joke is incubating in a feed, waiting for your kids to shout it the next time you just want to eat a burger in peace.

And when they do, you’ll have two choices. You can say, “What’s wrong with this generation?” Or you can say, “Okay, what did we plug them into—and why does it keep spitting out 6-7?”