Now, whenever I have a frozen dinner (or even take-out), I like to add some spices to it. Whether it's salt and pepper - or chili powder and garlic salt - it tends to make the food more palatable.
Most everything we eat nowadays has to be sold in immense quantities - so it's been bland-ified for a mass audience. And, this isn't just everything at your local grocery store.
Even if you eat at a restaurant, there's usually only one or two suppliers in town - so, whether it's Greek or Tacos, it's usually exactly the same stuff inside. It's just been prepared slightly different.
I like hot food.
This really sucks. Because, as I pointed out earlier, everything we buy has been Americanized - generecized.
So, I was adding some spices to a Stouffer's Frozen Pot Roast Dinner. And, as I was stirring the spices in, I realized that there wasn't very much actual food in this 'dinner'. I had to literally scrape all the food into one corner in order to mix it up properly.
It was soooo pathetic - I took a picture:
Most everything we eat nowadays has to be sold in immense quantities - so it's been bland-ified for a mass audience. And, this isn't just everything at your local grocery store.
Even if you eat at a restaurant, there's usually only one or two suppliers in town - so, whether it's Greek or Tacos, it's usually exactly the same stuff inside. It's just been prepared slightly different.
I like hot food.
This really sucks. Because, as I pointed out earlier, everything we buy has been Americanized - generecized.
So, I was adding some spices to a Stouffer's Frozen Pot Roast Dinner. And, as I was stirring the spices in, I realized that there wasn't very much actual food in this 'dinner'. I had to literally scrape all the food into one corner in order to mix it up properly.
It was soooo pathetic - I took a picture:
Remember - I hadn't taken so much as a bite out of this 'dinner' yet!
You could have cupped the entirety of this 'dinner' in the palm of your hand. You could literally palm it. And you wouldn't have to be Shaq either! A small Filipino woman with tiny little hands could do it.
Then, I looked closer at the black container and the box it came in. This little bit of food didn't need to come in packaging this big. They could cut their cardboard usage in half - as well as their black plastic and celophane expenditures! So, why would they be wasting all this money on useless packaging???
Oh right... It's probably more economically feasible to spend 30% more on oversized packaging - than it is to package the product properly (and watch your customers stop buying your product because it's so small).
Have you ever gotten food at McDonald's and opened the bag carefully - and found every single fry still safely in it's paper or cardboard container? Once? Not even once?!? Just by random probability - it ought to happen some time. Law of Averages and everything...
But, it never does. Do you know why? Because they actually train their employees to spill the fries when they're putting them in the bag. This way it tricks the customer's mind: They get a container of fries - and lo and behold - an extra handful in the bottom of the bag. Then, they probably won't notice that the container of fries is only half-full. They think they got more - when they probably got less.
I recently purchased a DVD home theatre speaker system thingy. It was around five or six hundred dollars - and came in this big box. But, when I opened it up, probably 80% of the volume of the box was filler (styrofoam, cardboard, etc...). Same thing when I opened a box with a vcr/dvd combo thingy. The box was intentionally designed to make the product look more substantial than it actually was. In fact, there were even two of these cardboard packaging things that served no actual purpose but to take up space and add bulk (they were almost the size of a phone book - but instead of being hollow and light, they were composed of about a dozen large layers of corrugated board glued together in a thick pad).
So, in this Wal-Mart-World we live in, where everything has to be mass-produced and streamlined, where marketability means more than quality of product, where customer service is something you do after you make the sale and therefore irrelevant, where every penny counts - why aren't these companies being held accountable legally or financially for perpetrating this on us?
So, I thought I'd hold my own little experiment and see just how ridiculous some of the packaging has gotten for some of the products we use every day.
The obvious first choice to start: Potato Chips!
Potato chip companies are notorious for selling what are, in effect, large bags of air.
So I opened a 250g (~half-pound) bag of chips. It was enough to fill two full bowls:
You could have cupped the entirety of this 'dinner' in the palm of your hand. You could literally palm it. And you wouldn't have to be Shaq either! A small Filipino woman with tiny little hands could do it.
Then, I looked closer at the black container and the box it came in. This little bit of food didn't need to come in packaging this big. They could cut their cardboard usage in half - as well as their black plastic and celophane expenditures! So, why would they be wasting all this money on useless packaging???
Oh right... It's probably more economically feasible to spend 30% more on oversized packaging - than it is to package the product properly (and watch your customers stop buying your product because it's so small).
Have you ever gotten food at McDonald's and opened the bag carefully - and found every single fry still safely in it's paper or cardboard container? Once? Not even once?!? Just by random probability - it ought to happen some time. Law of Averages and everything...
But, it never does. Do you know why? Because they actually train their employees to spill the fries when they're putting them in the bag. This way it tricks the customer's mind: They get a container of fries - and lo and behold - an extra handful in the bottom of the bag. Then, they probably won't notice that the container of fries is only half-full. They think they got more - when they probably got less.
I recently purchased a DVD home theatre speaker system thingy. It was around five or six hundred dollars - and came in this big box. But, when I opened it up, probably 80% of the volume of the box was filler (styrofoam, cardboard, etc...). Same thing when I opened a box with a vcr/dvd combo thingy. The box was intentionally designed to make the product look more substantial than it actually was. In fact, there were even two of these cardboard packaging things that served no actual purpose but to take up space and add bulk (they were almost the size of a phone book - but instead of being hollow and light, they were composed of about a dozen large layers of corrugated board glued together in a thick pad).
So, in this Wal-Mart-World we live in, where everything has to be mass-produced and streamlined, where marketability means more than quality of product, where customer service is something you do after you make the sale and therefore irrelevant, where every penny counts - why aren't these companies being held accountable legally or financially for perpetrating this on us?
So, I thought I'd hold my own little experiment and see just how ridiculous some of the packaging has gotten for some of the products we use every day.
The obvious first choice to start: Potato Chips!
Potato chip companies are notorious for selling what are, in effect, large bags of air.
So I opened a 250g (~half-pound) bag of chips. It was enough to fill two full bowls:
Yes - this is supposed to be 'pot roast'!
Brown goo, perhaps?
Appetizing!
Brown goo, perhaps?
Appetizing!
Ridiculous Packaging
But, how best to show how much actual food this is? Hmmmm. I guess we'll have to powder them!
After doing much research (both on the internet, with my Mother, and with master chefs around the globe), and after dismissing my first choice over feasibility (steamroller), I decided that a good old zip-lock bag and a soup spoon would be the way to go:
After doing much research (both on the internet, with my Mother, and with master chefs around the globe), and after dismissing my first choice over feasibility (steamroller), I decided that a good old zip-lock bag and a soup spoon would be the way to go:
And, you know what? The potato chips actually passed my test! Sure there was only a fraction of the volume (of the original container) in actual food. But, that's to be expected when purchasing something that's packed loose like potato chips.
But, now what to do with a small mountain of sour-cream and onion potato chip powder?...
I wonder if you could snort this fine, 100% pure yellow gold?...
I wonder if you could snort this fine, 100% pure yellow gold?...
Um no, you can't...
You can, however, dip your genitals in honey - roll them with the powdered potato chips - and then have one very happy, very appreciative, pet dog...
Next up: pills!
The pharmaceutical industry isn't known for giving customers the best deals. They might just need to use techniques like this. Heck, I don't think anyone actually believes that a little bottle of pills would require eight bloody ounces of spun cotton - just to keep them safe on their journey. So, I went to the store and purchased some ibuprofen - and surprisingly this bottle didn't need any cotton at all.
The pharmaceutical industry isn't known for giving customers the best deals. They might just need to use techniques like this. Heck, I don't think anyone actually believes that a little bottle of pills would require eight bloody ounces of spun cotton - just to keep them safe on their journey. So, I went to the store and purchased some ibuprofen - and surprisingly this bottle didn't need any cotton at all.
In fact, to be able to get a shot of the pills - I had to get up on a stool and look almost straight down into the bottle!
I love how you can see the bottom of the bottle right through the huge amount of pills!
Does this bottle really need to be this big? Wouldn't a bottle - oh, I don't know... ONE FIFTH THE SIZE - do?
Heck, I just thought it was hilarious that the packaging was in fact so huge - that all the product could easily fit on top (even the little moisture absorber thingy)!
Heck, I just thought it was hilarious that the packaging was in fact so huge - that all the product could easily fit on top (even the little moisture absorber thingy)!
In this picture here, I haven't removed anything from the bottle except for the safety foil - the pills are all still inside!
Psychological warfare on the consumer