Jimmy ‘MrBeast’ Donaldson brought jobs to his North Carolina hometown. Now locals are part of the show, whether they like it or not.
The MrBeast company’s impact on Greenville throws a spotlight on how remarkably conventional the online-influencer business has become, bringing jobs, money and opportunity to cities thousands of miles from Hollywood. Donaldson has reshaped this Southern college town and its rural surroundings into what some locals now call “Beastville” — a small playground of viral spectacle centered around a huge, unpredictable star. And the people have changed, too.
But Greenville is flat and landlocked, its miles of soybean fields crossed with strip malls and industrial parks. People spend their whole lives here without leaving, and some folks don’t quite understand why Donaldson is one of them. “The sightseers, or whatever they were,” said Buddy Medlin, an insurance adjuster who lives on the block, “would crowd up everything.”
Some business owners in town have turned getting Donaldson’s attention, and free publicity, into an obsession. After seeing how a mob of children crowded outside a space near her hairdresser where Donaldson’s crew was working, Miki Ragsdale, the owner of a pastry shop,, said she pitched his crew to come by and see how much candy they could eat. “Nobody got back to me,” she said.The folks in Donaldson’s neighborhood say their initial fears of a descent into madness have faded.
Like 455 other contestants, the bartender was given a numbered track suit and instructed to compete in a gantlet of elaborate challenges for a half-million-dollar prize. He “died” early but still made $2,000 from two days of work, which mostly involved waiting, huddled in a giant crowd, as cameras and producers swung into place.
But one resident in a manufactured-home community half a mile away said the booms shook the pictures off her walls at 10 a.m., leading her and several elderly neighbors to walk outside, terrified. “It felt like I was in a war zone,” said the woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she worried how people in her neighborhood might react.
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