"There is nothing like a war to build brand loyalty."
Honest-to-God, that is the first line of an article on page B1 of today's Wall Street Journal. The article goes on to trumpet how corporations jockey to be the ones to make sure it is their brands that get supplied to the military. You know, blowing away a bunch of enemy soldiers can be a memorable experience in a young person's life, and so it naturally follows that the brand of candy bar and soft drink you celebrate your success and survival with will also exert a strong emotional pull. Coca-Cola and Kellogg's Pop-Tarts want to be sure they are the ones you recall so fondly.
It's not easy conforming to all those military regulations on "pan-coated chocolate disks," "toffee rolls, chocolate flavored" and "cylindrical cheese-filled pretzels," (that's M&Ms, Tootsie Rolls and Combos to us civilians), but the brand loyalty payback is evidently worth it. Corporations wage veritable battles over supplying the military, and the winner gets the spoils of making sure our soldiers get Colgate instead of Crest, Charmin instead of Scotts, and to make sure it is Keebler elves and not the Pillsbury Doughboy on the front lines with our troops.
And remember: If our great corporations can display such glee over opportunities to market their products to people who have been ripped from their home and families to possibly die fighting an unnecessary war, just think how much time, energy and plotting they put into marketing to YOU...
Friday, March 14, 2003
Thursday, March 13, 2003
Welcome Co-Workers, Friends and Family
If you read a lot of weblogs and dig deep enough into them, you'll often find some admission that the weblog is a secret. You know what I mean:
"If my boss ever read what I write about his stupidity here, the jerk would fire me for sure, and it would be his loss because I'm the only one who keeps his incompetence from tanking the company"
"I can't tell my husband about this weblog, or he would find out about the affair I'm having with the neighbor's English sheepdog"
"Thank God my family doesn't know about this blog, because then I couldn't write about the emotional damage my mother inflicts on me each and every endless goddamn day of my miserable life."
Well, DebtorsPrison is a fully public blog, with friends, family and co-workers urged to visit and read. Not that I don't do it with a bit of trepidation. It's embarrassing to admit I have $22,826.32 in credit card debt. Debt is perhaps not so shameful a confession as it was a generation ago, but it is something which can make people question your values, your judgment and your sanity, not to mention the way they subtly clutch their pocketbooks a bit closer to their bodies when you draw near.
Of course, questioning our values, judgment and sanity is what DebtorsPrison is all about. Sharing my troubles gives me a framework for examining this consumer culture which engulfs us and constantly exhorts us to act with such heedless self-interest.
The more I share, the more I learn how common my plight is. I have built my debt largely on non-tangible lifestyle choices: travel, taking jobs with less pay, borrowing to help start my wife's business (Read More About How I Got Into Debt). Others have built up their debts one Cuisinart, CD boxed set and La-Z-Boy recliner at a time. Still others have been forced into debt by job loss or illness. And even those who have little or no debt seem to be worried about it happening to them.
So welcome all to DebtorsPrison. Thanks for reading and thanks for sharing. And no, it's not true I have another, secret weblog about my sex life....
"If my boss ever read what I write about his stupidity here, the jerk would fire me for sure, and it would be his loss because I'm the only one who keeps his incompetence from tanking the company"
"I can't tell my husband about this weblog, or he would find out about the affair I'm having with the neighbor's English sheepdog"
"Thank God my family doesn't know about this blog, because then I couldn't write about the emotional damage my mother inflicts on me each and every endless goddamn day of my miserable life."
Well, DebtorsPrison is a fully public blog, with friends, family and co-workers urged to visit and read. Not that I don't do it with a bit of trepidation. It's embarrassing to admit I have $22,826.32 in credit card debt. Debt is perhaps not so shameful a confession as it was a generation ago, but it is something which can make people question your values, your judgment and your sanity, not to mention the way they subtly clutch their pocketbooks a bit closer to their bodies when you draw near.
Of course, questioning our values, judgment and sanity is what DebtorsPrison is all about. Sharing my troubles gives me a framework for examining this consumer culture which engulfs us and constantly exhorts us to act with such heedless self-interest.
The more I share, the more I learn how common my plight is. I have built my debt largely on non-tangible lifestyle choices: travel, taking jobs with less pay, borrowing to help start my wife's business (Read More About How I Got Into Debt). Others have built up their debts one Cuisinart, CD boxed set and La-Z-Boy recliner at a time. Still others have been forced into debt by job loss or illness. And even those who have little or no debt seem to be worried about it happening to them.
So welcome all to DebtorsPrison. Thanks for reading and thanks for sharing. And no, it's not true I have another, secret weblog about my sex life....
Follow-up on Organic Foods
I wanted to follow up on my earlier entry on the sneak attack on federal organic food standards by Georgia Republican congressman Nathan Deal(Read It Here).
For all you over-the-top political junkies out there, here is the actual text he had inserted into the federal spending bill passed on February 13, 2003:
What this says in ordinary language is that meat and poultry producers can label their beef and chicken 'organic' even if it is not, and the government can't do a thing about it. Representative Deal snuck this into the budget bill to help out a poultry producer in his state that wants to cash in on the growing market for organic food without having to actually pay the extra money to make its chicken organic.
You can read more about this in my earlier entry and also HERE. Bills have been introduced in both the Senate (bill S-457) and the House of Representatives (bill HR-955) to have Deal's dirty work undone, but at present both bills are still sitting in committee. Please write, fax, email or phone your legislators to urge them to pass these bills. Help in doing so can be found at both the links above.
For all you over-the-top political junkies out there, here is the actual text he had inserted into the federal spending bill passed on February 13, 2003:
Sec. 771. None of the funds made available in this Act may be used to require that a farm satisfy section 2110(c)(1) of the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 (7 U.S.C. 6509(c)(1)) in order to be certified under such Act as an organic farm with respect to the livestock produced on the farm unless the report prepared by the Secretary of Agriculture pursuant to the recommendations contained in the joint explanatory statement of the Managers on the Law 107-171 (House Conference Report 107-424, pages 672-673) confirms the commercial availability of organically produced feed, at no more than twice the cost of conventionally produced feed, to meet current market demands."
What this says in ordinary language is that meat and poultry producers can label their beef and chicken 'organic' even if it is not, and the government can't do a thing about it. Representative Deal snuck this into the budget bill to help out a poultry producer in his state that wants to cash in on the growing market for organic food without having to actually pay the extra money to make its chicken organic.
You can read more about this in my earlier entry and also HERE. Bills have been introduced in both the Senate (bill S-457) and the House of Representatives (bill HR-955) to have Deal's dirty work undone, but at present both bills are still sitting in committee. Please write, fax, email or phone your legislators to urge them to pass these bills. Help in doing so can be found at both the links above.
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