Posts Tagged grocery store
Your Worries… Solved!
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Money and Marketing on July 8th, 2009
Seen in a grocery store check-out line:
Compare the first and second items to the last one. Oh, the irony. This magazine cover is a perfect example of the schizophrenia that I think is present in the current attitude that marketers encourage us to have towards our bodies, and our lives in general. They play up, or even manufacture, problems, so that they can sell us products that solve those problems. Of course, the problems can never be cmopletely solved, or we wouldn’t need to keep buying things, so new problems keep getting created. This is how we end up worrying about “double chins” and “excess sweat”. Really?! Excess sweat?! How much is too much, anyway?
My solution for body anxiety is to not expose myself to marketing messages that encourage me to be anxious about my body.
Hyperbolic advertising: cheese is never opinionated
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Money and Marketing on May 22nd, 2009
It all started with tomatoes. The tomatoes from my friend’s home garden and from the CSA tasted so much better than the tomatoes I got from the grocery store. I was dismayed to realize what I had been missing out on this whole time.
It’s no surprise. I’d never really even tasted a tomato. Commercial tomatoes are bred for size, appearance, and resistance to damage during shipping, not flavor. They are usually picked green and then ripened by exposing them to ethylene.
This got me thinking about the dilution and substitution of experience. My definition of a tomato had been watered down so thoroughly that I hardly knew what I was missing. Of course, the lack of substance isn’t really relevant to marketers, who are happy to supply us with other forms of stimulation to keep us from noticing what we’ve lost.
Which brings me to this commercial, from NBC:
It’s a cute commercial, no doubt, but I found myself thinking, “I really like The Office, but I hardly ever find myself actually laughing out loud at it, never mind laughing my ass off. In fact, I almost never laugh at network TV, even shows I like.”
And then I started to see it everywhere: the unbelievably hyperbolic adjectives used in advertising to describe the experience you are supposed to associate with the product. Advertising has always exaggerated the virtues of the product; that’s nothing new. The interesting thing to me about these ads is the way in which they exaggerate not qualities of the product itself, but the experience that you will presumably have when you use or consume the product. The difference between the promise and reality is profound.
An ad for Petit Ecolier, a chocolate-covered cookie, suggests that you, “Lose and find yourself in one bite.” If that’s the experience that you will have when you eat the cookie, then I want some of whatever chemicals you’re taking. Can a cookie even do that? The ad below describes one woman’s experience of eating a Hardee’s hamburger. As you watch it, think back to the last fast food hamburger you ate, and ask yourself if it “reminded you of being in high school, sneaking out before dinner to savor that sweet, spicy sauce.”
“The High Cost of Poverty” – Washington Post
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Money and Marketing on May 21st, 2009
This article in the Washington Post describes the phenomenon behind the phrase, “Being poor is expensive.” I agree that people with little money sometimes end up spending more on the same items that those with more money can get cheaper. The article gives the example of urban poor having the choice of either riding a bus for a few hours to get to and from a grocery store or spending much more to buy the same items at a close-by convenience store.
When it comes to food, there’s not much to argue about. You’ve gotta eat. If you don’t live close to a grocery store and you don’t own a vehicle, your choices are pretty limited. But so many of the other examples given by the author ring false to me.
The poor pay more in hassle: the calls from the bill collectors, the landlord, the utility company. So they spend money to avoid the hassle. The poor pay for caller identification because it gives them peace of mind to weed out calls from bill collectors.
Here, the author seems to have confused “the poor” with “people who don’t pay their bills”. I get it. When you’ve got money, it’s easier to live within your means and pay your bills on time. It’s easier to weather an unexpected expense without falling behind. But that doesn’t mean that poor people don’t pay their bills too. As far as I’m concerned, this comment does a disservice to those poor people who live within their means and pay their bills on time.
The rich have direct deposit for their paychecks. The poor have check-cashing and payday loan joints, which cost time and money.
I’m sorry. Can poor people not get checking accounts too? It’s been a long time since I opened an account, so I browsed the web sites of several popular banks, and it looks to me like all you need is an address, a deposit, and a social security number.
Outside the ACE check-cashing office on Georgia Avenue in Petworth, Harrison Blakeney, 67, explains a hard financial lesson of poverty. He uses the check-cashing store to pay his telephone bill. The store charges 10 percent to take Blakeney’s money and send the payment to the phone company. That 10 percent becomes what it costs him to get his payment to the telephone company on time. Ten percent is more than the cost of a stamp. But, Blakeney says: “I don’t have time to mail it. You come here and get it done. Then you don’t get charged with the late fee.”
You “don’t have time to mail it”? Somebody explain this to me. You have time to go to the check cashing place, stand in line, and pay the bill, but you don’t have time to get a stamp and drop the bill in the mail? What am I missing here? Could poor financial decisions like this be contributing to Mr. Blakeney’s situation?
You ask him why he didn’t just go to a bank. But his story is as complicated as the various reasons people find themselves in poverty and in need of a check-cashing joint. He says he lost his driver’s license and now his regular bank “won’t recognize me as a human. That’s why I had to come here. It’s a rip-off, but it’s like a convenience store. You pay for the convenience.”
Losing your driver’s license is not unique to poor people, but nevertheless, you can get a state-issued picture ID at the DMV. Will that cost you in terms of time and money? Probably. But how many checks would you have to cash for free at your own bank, instead of paying $15/$100 at the check-cashing place, to make up that cost?
On a hot spring afternoon, Jacob Carter finds himself standing in a checkout line at the Giant on Alabama Avenue SE. Before the cashier finishes ringing up his items, he puts $43 on the conveyor belt. But his bill comes to $52.07. He has no more money, so he tells the clerk to start removing items.
The clerk suggests that he use his “bonus card” for savings.
Carter tells the clerk he has no such card.
I checked online. The Giant bonus card is free. You can apply for one and get it immediately at the customer service desk in any Giant grocery store. Why doesn’t he have one? Why doesn’t he go get one right now? The author of the article is more interested in presenting a sob-story than in actually examining the issue, and so does not raise questions like these.
I may be a Jack-Booted Liberal, but I’m not Liberal enough to sympathize with these stories.
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