Marketing

I find my head hurting when I pay-more-than-is-healthy-for-my-sanity attention to things. Subliminal advertising. Even though I'm not, by choice, subjected to the incessant onslaught of such rubbish from teevee. But I read ingredients on tins and containers and boxes for in our blessed-by-Obama-and-Harper-Monsanto world I need to be.

Case in point is this box of tissues:




I remember, and not too short a few years ago when one got 200 to a box. That was standard. Now the companies who make them, from what we hope are sustainable forests, have shaved the quantity away until the box now contains 132. 132. Nearly 1/2. The box remains, of course, the same size and has increased dramatically in price.

Then I look at the symbol of the Royale company which happens to be kittens. I remember - possibly an urban legend - a few years back a report of how these white fluffy kittens had died under the hot studio lights. Sacrificial kittens. On the altar of nose and toilet tissue. As to the kittens symbolizing the product I know the last thing I'd want would be their claws on my privates or nostrils. And now, if their deaths are true, every box and roll is like a memorial to the merchandising sacrifice of those wee felines. (I did a web search and not a thing on the death of those babies - maybe Kleenex in their wipe rivalry had a hand in that?)

If that were not enough though, the box also tells me that the tissues are hypoallergenic. Shouldn't tissues be? Shouldn't that be a given? I mean if you're busy honking away with your head cold the last thing you'd need would be an allergic reaction to your paper hanky surely? And what of the tissues from way back which were not (I assume) hypoallergenic? Should I be worried about dormant allergens nesting quietly in my lungs waiting to break out and kill me in some weak moment? Note: there is no medical definition for the word hypoallergenic



Bafflespeak. 1984? - We've left you far, far behind.