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Home > Lucki Stars > Adding Insult
Adding Insult
by
Lucki Melander Wilder
Lucki, I think we're kindred spirits on the advertising thing. I notice many of the same little nuances,
and have often thought I should keep a notebook handy to write them down.
-- Tom Ligon, SF author
It's surprising (or perhaps not) how many times I "Say what?!" to TV advertising, and want to share the fun with someone (everyone?) else.
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2025-02-25
Reverse Reverse
Bill Maher of Real Time fame recently gave me a term I've been trying to come up with for years if not decades. The term is "Reverse Improvement". It's a way of describing the phenomenon I mean when I say, "I'm sick and tired of product producers and service providers repeatedly 'improving' things until they become absolutely useless."
So today, rather than riffing on TV adverts for products and services that suffer from reverse improvement (like my new satellite box, which both interrupts my viewing and limits my ability to autotune, when I was perfectly happy with its less-anal predecessor, which didn't assume I'm an idiot incapable of making or remembering my own decisions), I'm going to give you an example gleaned from an 'ad' on a label itself.
The product is one of my favorite forms of hummus: roasted pine nut. (I also favor roasted red pepper, and spinach and artichoke, and edamame hummus.) The last time I bought a 10-ounce container, I noticed something different on the label: a bright blue banner with white letters exclaiming "NEW! MORE TOPPING". Oh, wow, an improvement.
But wait a second. The weight is still 10 ounces. So if I'm getting more topping, I 'm getting less hummus. right? Well, maybe OK, 'cuz I'll definitely enjoy the extra pine nuts.
Only, the topping doesn't look the same; it's got red bits in it, and black stuff all over the place. A check of the ingredients label informs me that the red bits are roasted red pepper and the black stuff is black pepper. So I'm not getting more pine nuts, I'm actually getting less pine nuts and more stuff adulterating them, yeah? Come on, if I wanted red peppers, I'd get red-pepper hummus. Or chop up my own leftover red peppers and stir them in with the pine nuts myself. Or buy a container of each and mix them together. And If I wanted black pepper all over my hummus, which I don't, I'd use my own pepper shaker.
Drats! That's a reverse improvement. A form of shrinkflation. Pay the same (or more) but get less of what I'm paying for. And I'm sick and tired of it. I may eliminate that variety - or even that brand - from my buying altogether. Or, if all the brands start doing that adulteration, I may eliminate buying store hummus altogether. 'Cuz perhaps, if I start jonesing for the stuff, I can make my own (not that I'm any great shakes as a cook). Or even go to my numerous Persian friends with a bag of chickpeas and a jar of ground sesame and maybe some pine nuts (harvested, with permission, from the tree next door?) or red peppers, and ask them can I buy back some hummus when they make their own like it's supposed to be made.
Or maybe if I and a gazillion other consumers start complaining to producers of this and that, and demand they reverse their reverse improvements, we'll all start to see some real improvements.
What do you think?
Fri, Mar 14, 2025 at 3:30 PM, Nancy B wrote:
If a lot of us did that, maybe they'd change; otherwise, not. Yes, there's a lot of products that do that. I think when people get wise to that (which blogs like yours help) AND read the whole labels, they'll say "I don't need to pay for junk that I don't want." You did a good job on this one, but then you always do. And I like your pine-nut cone that looks like a flower. |
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Lucki responds to Nancy:
Thanks for the high praise, Nancy. And yes, our dollars - as in our withholding thereof - is (if you'll pardon the pun) bottom-line the only thing that will get through to producers. |
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