The Pains of Consuming

I've done it again. Gone and killed another of my favorite products. Merely by enjoying them, it seems I consign them to some sort of consumer products death sentence, where like Stalin's political enemies they disappear and are never seen again.

According to several news reports, it's not hard to do. Products are coming and going in unprecedented numbers. And just about anything affects it. Corporate mergers. Supply chain issues. Sales. Executive whims. Pandemics.

As a guy with a few kinks in his tastebuds (I detest seafood and poultry, for example) I don't expect to find an endless array of foodstuffs that appeal to me. But when my tastebuds find themselves in the mainstream, I kind of hope things will stick around for a while.

Take Knorr Foods One Skillet dinners. Just last year, I discovered the Steak, Pepper, Brown Rice and Quinoa variety. And the Moroccan-Style Chicken with Barley, which asked only that the preparer add carrots and raisins. (Okay, I admit it—the latter is a little exotic. And if you're wondering, I substituted the chicken with pork.)

But they were amazing! I mean, restaurant-quality food from my kitchen? Are you serious?

But there they were.

Yes, there was some prep required. With the former, one red and one green pepper needed to be sliced, along with a pound and a half of good beef (I used London broil). With the latter, the pork had to be similarly prepped, along with the carrots.

No big deal.

Then each ingredient had to be cooked separately, with each one picking up traces of the item cooked previously. Finally, there was a grand re-combining. Let stand for a couple of minutes and they were ready to go.

I consumed them like someone who hadn't eaten for weeks. Leftovers existed only theoretically.

After several months of One Skillet nirvana, I began to notice one of two things when I went to re-stock: they were either gone (along with their shelf IDs), or they were on sale—the clearance kind.

It being the year of COVID, so much could have gone wrong.

And yet on the other hand, with so many people spending so much time at home, I would have thought a product like this, which required only a few, easy to find additions and yielded a restaurant-quality dinner in return would have been wildly popular.

I was wrong.

But I'll never know for sure. Responses from Knorr were vague and never confirmed the status of these products. But their continued absence from the corporate web site and store shelves doesn't paint a bright picture.

Even on the inedible side of the marketplace favorites disappear.

If you can find it, take my all-time favorite car wax. It was my wife who first spied Final Detail on QVC, and was impressed by the claims of the manufacturer. Mindful of the many hours her hubby spent washing and waxing their cars, she ordered.

Perhaps displaying a bit of gender-based skepticism, I regarded the product with a noncommittal “Hmmm.” It seemed too good to be true. But because of the degraded condition of the wax on hand (I had stupidly left it the garage, where it had frozen over the winter), Final Detail was pressed into service earlier than anticipated.

And I was awed.

My car shone like the proverbial diamond. It was its own auto show. The sun was reflected in a tightly-focused, blinding point of light. Even better, Final Detail could be used across several different types of surfaces. I was immersed in Final Detail delirium. People stared. 

(At the car. Not my delirium.) 

Not so surprisingly, my wife was immersed in a gentle form of I-told-you-so delight. As if I even needed the reminder, she was a woman worth listening to. And I don't hesitate to say I did.

Marital tangents aside, I became hooked on Final Detail. I swore by the stuff. But life changed, and finances no longer allowed for luxuries like garages. And things like waxing the car took a backseat to things like looking for a job.

When we were again able to afford housing with garages, I resumed my old habits. The diamond-like luster it cloaked my 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder* in made my heart swell. Perfection!

So when bottle number-one of a two-pack ran dry, I began searching for replacements. I may as well been looking for a break on my Illinois property tax. It is gone.

There is a lady by the name of Bridgette in Sumner County, Tennessee who is selling a bottle on Varage Sale for $30—roughly three-times its original price. But apart from hers, good luck.

However humiliating it is to admit, I am a consumer-oriented capitalist at heart. And when I find that rare product that either tastes really good or works really well, I seek an LTR faster than a lonely soul on a dating site.

I mean, I'm there.

But the world's titans of industry need to cooperate. It's hard to believe this even needs to be said, but I can't have an LTR by myself. And insofar as One Skillet dinners and Final Detail car wax are concerned, I seem destined to remain a party of one at a table for two.

Sigh.

* = This is a bald-faced lie. While I am presumably capable of driving and waxing a 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder, there exist several million reasons why this won't ever happen. 

 

Dammed If You Do

Economists are alarmed. Americans aren't spending. And since their spending drives two-thirds of the economy, economists warn of dire consequences should this trend become permanent.

(Of course, they have warned of the dire consequences of not saving as well. Hence the title of this post.)

I would love the opportunity to ask these economists (many of whom, it must be remembered, are policymakers) why they suppose Americans aren't spending.

Could it be that with memories of the Great Recession fresh in our minds, and of the vicious and wholesale job-shedding that followed, private-sector Americans have realized exactly how tenuous their livelihoods are?

Is it possible we have finally come to understand that most of us are merely expenses to our employers? Expenses to be winnowed down and/or eliminated lest shareholders become upset at not being made exponentially wealthier than they were last month?

Or that, with the inevitable passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership looming, we will become more vulnerable still?

Why, exactly, should we spend? I mean, who does it benefit?

China? Bangladesh? Mexico? Some tax-dodging executive shoveling cash at Republican misanthropes? Perhaps e-Bay is the biggest beneficiary—at least when we desire to rid ourselves of the junk we've accumulated.

I was once an enthusiastic consumer, and for that I have been rewarded with a lifetime supply of underemployment after committing the unforgivable sin of being unemployed when the Great Recession hit. 

(I was preparing for a cross-country move, if you must know.)

It is sobering to realize the economy you once so obediently served now wants nothing to do with you. To think nothing of the money spent on entities which now refuse to even consider hiring you.

It is also a powerful incentive to save.

Our captains of industry have been repeating a thinly-disguised threat for years, that the American worker needs to remain competitive in the global market place or face extinction. And the American worker responded. American workers are among the most productive in the world, even as the buying power of our wages remains flat or even falls.

But—big surprise—it isn't enough.

Without the one-hundred percent profit margin, business is just having a really tough time making this thing work. How are they to pay living wages and buy our elected representation?

However easy their virtue, you should know Congressmen don't come cheap.

Businesses solution is to outsource jobs and re-locate corporate headquarters to foreign tax havens as their increasingly contracted and part-time work force requires government assistance and health care.

It is the most indefensible kind of cost-shifting.

In the end, what is really curious is that even as the American worker becomes ever more marginalized, the American consumer is apparently still very much in demand.

Does anyone—anyone at all—see the disparity?

Tainted Love

Business loves me
This I know
For the advertising
Tells me so

(with apologies to Anna Warner)


I’m so happy. I woke up today and realized I am loved! I stretched my limbs languorously and reveled in the warmth of it. Okay, so it’s not the torrid stuff of tabloid magazines. It’s different than that. It’s subtle and understated—more resonant.

It’s the kind that makes you clutch your pillow and close your eyes in quiet contentment. It’s forever. Or as long as I possess a functioning credit card. Whichever comes first.

Kidding aside, ever heard the expression actions speak louder than words?

You might have heard it was inspired by Confucius. Or St. Francis of Assisi. Wrong. It was inspired by the business gap—the gulf that exists between a businesses marketing and its standard operating procedure.

Take the supermarket chain I work for. It has a big business gap. It spouts its love of customers like a lovesick fourteen-year-old girl writing in her diary. The only thing missing are the hearts drawn in strawberry-scented ink.

Too bad it isn’t true.

Grocery shopping is work. It’s repeated motions, done and undone many times. Put the food in the cart, take the food out of the cart. Put the food on the check-out counter, take the food off the check-out counter. Put the food in the car, take the food out of the car. And so on.

This doesn’t even take into account reading between the lines on coupons, discerning which flavor of frozen entrée is—and isn’t—on sale, hoping you’re in possession of the keychain with the rewards card on it and the reusable grocery bags and remembering the debit card's PIN.

Look! Your five-year-old just tore open a pack of Skittles and spilled them all over the floor.

The chain I work for began as a no-frills market, with the gimmick being that along with the warehouse-like environment were the lowest-possible prices. Along with the prices, grocery baggers were cut. Marketing experts determined that bagging your own groceries was just part of the fun.

But by 2011, any appeal that idea held has been thoroughly and irretrievably exhausted. In a world in which most women work (in addition to their traditional responsibilities), grocery shopping is just one more chore. Adding insult to injury, it is also one that must be paid for.

And my employer has adapted. We now have baggers. Technically.

We have baggers as long as they’re not cleaning bathrooms or retrieving shopping carts. Or returning unwanted items to store shelves. Or emptying garbage cans in far-flung corners of the building.

Because my employer is so stupendously and astonishingly efficient, when a bagger is idled for a minute or two because a credit card has been declined or a coupon is being disputed or because of the dreaded price check, they are whisked away.

Honesty compels me to admit that while it does lend an entertaining now-you-see-‘em, now-you-don’t aspect to the tedium of supermarket cashiering, customers with three-hundred dollars of groceries who chose your lane because there was a bagger at the end of it rarely see it this way.

So in addition to bearing the glowering rage of an upset customer, a cashier not only has to scan a massive order, but bag it as well. Which easily doubles the time it would take otherwise, and occurs roughly half the time a cashier is behind a register.

Even with glasses, I can’t find the customer service in this. Never mind the love.

It demands that the modest request of having your groceries bagged be the equivalent of a winning lottery ticket. Your groceries will be bagged if the bathrooms have been cleaned and shopping carts brought in and garbage emptied and unwanted items placed back on shelves and if the customer ahead of you doesn’t encounter or present a problem.

In other words, your groceries will be bagged only if the sun, moon and stars have aligned in just the right way. Business may love us, but it loves a big, fat profit margin more.

And my employer isn’t the only example. There’s the jewelry supplier who cut call center agents to improve its bottom line—even if it means the customers it says it cherishes will have to wait longer.

And the telecommunications giant who punishes service consultants for poor sales—but not for hanging up on customers. And the retailer who leaves calls unanswered and customers unapproached because staffing must be kept to an absolute, bare-bones minimum.

With profit margins shrinking like a wool sweater in a dryer and middle and lower-class wages skyrocketing the way they are, well, gosh, what’s a poor business to do? Something’s got to give.

And that something would be you.