Chip & Joanna Gaines' Out Of Touch Moments Torched Their Reputation

Chip and Joanna Gaines started out as the loving, relatable couple on HGTV's "Fixer Upper." Their series took run-down homes in Waco, Texas and transformed them into modern, sleek, and updated houses of participant's dreams. As Chip and Joanna built their reality TV empire, the pair started to build a lifestyle brand called Magnolia. Starting off as a small boutique, Magnolia soon expanded and the Gaineses even landed a brand deal with Target. Their fame funneled in fast, bringing them wealth, status, and connection until they shed their image of relatability in favor of celebrity. 

By 2025, the couple had become millionaires, and their continued efforts to remain in the public eye earned Chip and Joanna some accusations of detachment and aloofness. Their attempts to maintain the image they once had began to come off completely out of touch. With strange comments about wealth, self-aggrandizing new series, and tone-deaf business decisions, the powerful couple transformed their small-town image into a corporate brand, often resulting in tactless public choices. 

In June 2025, Chip and Joanna Gaines released a new series. No longer on HGTV, the couple excitedly premiered their new show "Fixer Upper: The Lakehouse" on their Magnolia Network. In the couple's famous playground of Waco, they announced their purchase of a sprawling lakefront home. In addition to their enormous farmhouse estate, the lake house buy was an obvious expense that many of the couple's fans couldn't relate to. 

Chip and Joanna weren't saved by the original premise of their "Fixer Upper" series, but instead dug themselves deeper into the out-of-touch hole by filming the renovation that would be added to their own personal real estate portfolio. Fans voiced their complaints about the uncomfortable and obvious separation between the reality stars and relatability, noting that the couple were annoying, unwatchable, and showoffs in the new series. 

"Y'all are yesterday's news. Quit destroying Waco," an Instagram user commented under Joanna's post featuring the lake house announcement. Others complained about tucking the show behind the high price of the Magnolia Network, noting that the streaming service was more than a little self-serving. "My cable bill finally got to the point where I changed the plan, it was ridiculously priced," one commenter wrote, adding of Chip and Joanna, "Guess they forgot about the [people] who helped make them big. Oh well."

Though Chip and Joanna Gaines got their start on HGTV in 2013, the house-flippers eventually moved to their own brand's Magnolia Network. Their severance from HGTV was meant to drive their fans to more "Fixer Upper" style shows that reflected the same tone of the pair's lifestyle, interior design, and cooking prowess. However, in December 2025, the famous reality TV couple returned to their stomping grounds with their HGTV show "Fixer Upper: Colorado Mountain Home." 

The new show was a play on their original series, "Fixer Upper," where the couple renovated homes for families and individuals looking for a big move. "Fixer Upper" centered these individuals' stories, makin Chip and Joanna a duo of heroes set to jazz up houses that were worn down. With "Fixer Upper: Colorado Mountain Home," the Gaineses ditched the relatable house-flipping story for restoration of their own vacation home. 

Without the inclusion of different homeowners at the heart of the episodes, "Fixer Upper: Colorado Mountain Home" flaunted the pair's wealth and power as they flipped their own house, a vacation home at that, with teams of assistants, construction workers, and creative minds. The couple's ability to completely restore their property on a seemingly uncapped budget was far from relatable to viewers. 

Chip Gaines is a huge college basketball fan, and when his alma mater talked about trading their head coach, Gaines inserted himself into the conversation. As the claims snowballed, spreading news that another college was attempting to pull Texas University basketball coach Scott Drew, Chip couldn't let the speculation continue. He issued his own commentary on the topic through social media in an embarrassing post that would send fans into a spiral in the comments section.

 "Money is boring ... everybody's got money," the reality star posted to his X (formerly Twitter) account. "We've got God on our side." His "money is boring" was a rich comment coming from a multimillionaire who owned several multimillion-dollar brands. Followers were not shy to let Chip know just how they felt about his post. "The 'everybody's got money' statement may be one of the most elitist and out of touch things I've heard. Smh," an X user wrote under Chip's post, criticizing his tone-deaf remarks about wealth. 

"No, not everybody has money," another commented, adding, "Rich people have money." Another X user put it plainly for the Texas University alum, writing "Everybody's got money @chipgaines ? You are so out of touch." 

With their series, Chip and Joanna Gaines were able to completely transform some of the less glamorous parts of Waco, Texas by taking homes that needed a little love and refurbishing them. As their brand and wealth grew, the Gaineses built up companies in the Texas town — local marketplaces, small restaurants, and branded shops. In a way, the pair reimaged their hometown into something that drew more tourists, more residents, and better businesses. 

But many locals saw the downside to the couple's impact on Waco. Thanks to Chip and Joanna's updates, Waco's taxes, homes, and rent prices all jumped up. "A lot of homeowners, especially retirees, are not happy about the Chip and Joanna effect. They're on a fixed income," a real estate professor told Realtor.com in 2020. "It is a financial burden [just] to meet the additional property taxes." As locals felt the pressure of the "Fixer Upper" effect that threatened to price them out of their homes, did the Gaineses make the decision to slow down? No. 

Despite local outcries, the pair continued to add to the Waco community. Hotel 1928 opened in 2023, following Magnolia Press in 2019, and the Magnolia vacation rentals that opened in 2021. Though these ventures have seen an increase in Waco's tourism, Chip and Joanna's empire has systematically made some locals' homes a place where they can no longer afford to live. 

On their platform, the Magnolia Network, Chip and Joanna Gaines made room for original shows like "Home Work," a home renovation series led by a similar house-flipping duo, husband and wife Andy and Candis Meredith. Just like Chip and Joanna's "Fixer Upper," the Merediths would find houses in need of help and renovate them for their series' participants. The show was welcomed warmly until, in a 2022 Instagram post, a "Home Work" participant revealed the shoddy work that the couple had put into her new home. 

She shared that the house renovation series left her in unsafe conditions that led her to seek legal action against the couple. Following the disagreement, several other accusations came out against the series, with other participants revealing their own bad experiences with the Merediths. In response, Chip and Joanna's network pulled the series... only to re-welcome it to their platform a mere week later. The network would address the complaints, claiming that a proper resolution was needed, while the series' leads would claim the allegations on social media were merely half-truths. Altogether, the response to participants' complaints that left them unsafe in the homes they paid for made the return of the series look like nothing more than a money grab for Chip and Joanna.