"What’s that you’re doing Walt?"
"It’s a new idea I’m working on for marketing products that are waaaaaay too cheap."
"Really? So how’s it gonna work?"
"Well, you take a dirt cheap product, like a really cheap shower gel, and you put it into sexy bottles that cost three times the product it contains. It’s a real winner."
"Come on Walt! Get real! So just how do you plan to make people buy it then?"
"Easy, you spend huge wadges on neat advertising, like loads of telly time; price it at five or six times what the entire package is worth, and people will rush to buy it like lemmings."
"But that makes no sense at all Walt!"
"Maybe not to you, but I reckon I’ll make a fortune out of it."
"Sorry Walt, I’m not really with you on this one ……. I just can’t see how it can possibly work, people just aren’t that stupid. And just what do they do with the sexy bottles when they’ve used up the shower gel? Oh ...... I’m with it now ....... they’re paying for the sexy plastic bottle so they can use it for something else, aren’t they?"
"No! They just chuck ‘em away!"
_________________________________
It all sounds absolutely crazy, doesn’t it, but that’s exactly what’s happening with many health and beauty products on the market today. Another little expose from the Daily Mail which neatly demonstrates the massively over-inflated cost to the consumer of some products, and even touches on the downstream cost (to the environment) of throwing the container (that cost three times more than the contained product, and will take more than 400 years to decompose) into landfill sites.
"It's crazy. You pay more for the packaging than the ingredients and then you have to pay again to chuck the wretched stuff away."
Quite! I couldn’t have put it better myself. We live in a mad, mad world.
2 comments:
There are soooo many ways to respond to this I don't know where to start.
Firstly, you (and the Daily Mail. Now there's a scary thought. At least they could never be accused of jumping on a bandwagon one minute and off it when it suits a second later... er... not).
I think what popped into my head first may be best, namely that there are so many things in life where the bit on the outside is much more significant than what's inside, yet other than offering a mechanism for seduction that only the contents can justify, becomes almost irrelevant once it has fulfilled its prime function.
I was going to say, 'just like the Palace of Westminster', but actually what's on the outside is what we value, and what's on the inside is as useless a collection of disposable debris as it is possible to imagine.
Maybe the better anology is the newspaper in which some (not us) may read this piece?:)
I kinda agree, but maybe too much ad man and libertarian remains not to allow that you should be able to do what you like to turn a buck so long as it's legal, decent, honest and truthful.
I vindicate myself by being a guy who is trying to instill the notion that if we do have consumerism, then at least let's direct its consequences in the best ways possible, such as reuse.
It may be the DM, but are they doing any more bandwagon jumping (both on and off) than any other member of our august and respected (once upon a time?) media?
I think that there are two key points here:-
1) As we all well know, 90%+ of the time, the packaging (bottle in this case) is junked and ends up as landfill. Not good at all, as I'm sure everyone will agree, and it unfortunately seems to be an almost ineluctable problem.
2) If you look at the actual costs involved, the breakdown is something like as follows:
Product 10p
Packaging 30p
Frieght costs 30p
VAT Included 30p
That means the profit on this product is 100p, i.e. the margin on this is 10 times its cost! Which I'm sure you will agree is pernicious as well as being a total consumer rip-off. Turning a buck is one thing, total rip-off is another. Sorry, but I can't consider this, under any circumstances, as being in any way decent, honest or truthful; even though it may be perfectly legal, as well as typical of today's consumerism frenzy.
[Interestingly, you can buy the very same product for ~£1.25 (which sounds a much fairer mark-up) in the smaller beauty chain shops, yet most still pay supermarket prices for the convenience of it.]
At least the DM itself usually does get recycled (probably most of the time, in fact) or gets reused as packaging, hamster bedding, fish & chip wrapping, or even for kicking the old log burner into life on a cold winter evening; and we DO get to vote [albeit perhaps all too infrequently] for the useless collection of disposable debris in the Palace of Westminster! Though I take your point that re:use of any of its particular content is pretty much an impossibility!
A Re:use, or at the very minimum, a re:cyle phase would be very welcome on plastic bottle packaging such as this. Sadly, as we both know, and as discussed on this very blog the other day, despite the numbers quoted by the local authorities, the actual facilities for recycling plastics do not appear to be as publically available as they are claimed to be. So the consumer pays through the nose for it, then suffers the consequences of long-term landfill disposal of the packaging that is worth considerably less than the content.
Post a Comment