Saturday, November 10, 2018

In the aisles

Observations from a recent trip to the supermarket:

* The annual marketing of eggnog started, I think, a little before Halloween. There are now several brands gracing the shelves. This includes Southern Comfort. Now it's not an insane market move for them. Eggnog is best served cool but not ice cold (I've tried eggnog flavored ice cream and it leaves something to be desired) and many like to put a little nip of something in it. Brandy might be best but whiskey-flavored liqueur is workable. Still, that means there are SoCo dairy farms out there, which just seems weird.

* One of the potato companies—McCain, I think—is marketing fries shaped like emoji. Ah well, you knew it was inevitable. From the packaging it's mostly just happy faces and surprised faces. No vomiting face. And the ever popular "swirl of shit with a manic grin" has been left out, for some reason.

2 comments:

susan said...

Although you do see it in the stores more often as the winter holiday season approaches I can't say eggnog has ever been a favourite of mine. Do you suppose that the dairies are conspiring with the liquor companies to get kids who are too young to drink to develop a taste for their products?

Speaking of beverages it turns out energy drinks caused vascular damage when they were tested on medical students (medicine's human guinea pigs). No surprise there really, but what caught my attention was when the authors mentioned that a lot of young people mix alcohol and energy drinks so they don't fall asleep when they get drunk.

Emoji shaped potato chips as a teaching device, perhaps? I remember making words with my alphabet soup. Emoji crossword puzzles might be next.


Ben said...

Oh, I'm beyond caring about anyone else's bad or "bad" habits. It is possible it's a kind of sub-rosa marketing technique. But I think the more immediate goal is to sell to people who aren't their customers in general.

Energy drinks have never really appealed to me. For one thing they're blandly sweet, maybe with an aftertaste. Also being tired is a message from your body, and you're better off giving into it to the extent you can get away with. It doesn't surprise me that there are side effects to drinking them.

Emoji crosswords? Bizarre idea, since they're sort of post-verbal, but stranger things have happened.