Hot dogs are an insidious foodstuff. You think to yourself "Surely, I have eaten several of these in one sitting casually. If I apply myself, I could eat double or triple the amount!", but in thinking that you have already fallen for their trap.

And so you eat your usual amount with relative ease, but the restaurant dogs are not like the ones you make at home, so they are more filling, but you press on and you eat another, and then another.

Suddenly, you can feel the weight of all of your mistakes in life culminating in that very moment, and you realize that you are nearly full and nowhere close to the measly goal you set for yourself, let alone the minimum amount of hot dogs you are required to consume in order for them to be considered an achievement.

But your pride demands that you continue, despite the loud protests of your body.

Eventually, you tap out, burdened with the shame of knowing exactly how many hot dogs you can eat in one sitting, and also knowing that it was nowhere near what you or anyone else expected you to be able to eat. The infernal sausages have beaten you.

I love that the enthusiastic tone of your comment was completely unaffected by the bland apathy of the diner owner's quote.

Usually hotdog eating competitions are timed. You get like 5 minutes to eat as many as possible, and 19 wouldn't even be close to qualifying.

Yeah it's probably just the journalist finding the silliest thing to lie about as part of this experiment