Tropicana: How not to run a loyalty campaign

Tropicana has a long-running loyalty campaign for their orange juice: you get 10 Aéroplan miles for each bottle of sugar-water you buy. They print a little code at the top of each carton, and you go to their website and enter the code to get your points. Sounds great, right?

The problem is that Tropicana can't seem to print the codes legibly. Every single time you try to enter a code, there's some problem or other: either the code is completely illegible, or the code isn't recognized, or a cosmic ray strikes their server, but whatever it is, you don't get your points. Furthermore, if you're trying gamely to puzzle out the code, the system locks you out, figuring you're trying to guess the code randomly. Check out these beauties:

Although I don't like to ascribe to malice what is more easily explained by negligence and sheer incompetence, this has been going on for years. I can't help but suspect at this point Tropicana's behaviour is willfully fraudulent: they print the offer on the carton to influence buyer behaviour, but they make it too irritating, difficult and time consuming to actually get the points. They could easily prove me wrong by fixing this problem, but something tells me they won't.

The fat of the land: berry season in BC

It took me nine months to appreciate Vancouver. We arrived here just after the torrential rains which flushed tons of particulate matter into the water supply, prompting a boil water advisory, and just before the windstorms which blew down 40% of Stanley Park. Since it rained for five months after we arrived, it took some getting used to.

When it changed for me was August, when the blackberries came into season. Morning and afternoon I'd bury myself in a briar, stuffing my face with berries and picking a pailful to eat the rest of the day. After that, I saw the city differently: the rain didn't bother me so much, the laid-back nothing's-going-on nature of the city life didn't leave me anxious, and Toronto seemed a bit farther away. This year I've picked so many of them that we can't keep up, and we're freezing them for wintertime. They are sweet and moist, ripe and ready to eat, the kind that can't be transported because they turn to mush so quickly after picking.

Two or three times per week I've been picking up a 5kg flat of blueberries on my way home. I strap it to my bicycle rack and drag it up the hill, trailing berries that escape through the slats in the side when I go over a bump. It's unbelievable, but between the two of us we polish off those blueberries in 24 hours. They're so ripe, so fresh, so fat and juicy – the texture is completely different from those sold in supermarkets.

Louie is also excited when berry season comes around because blueberries are his favourite treat. Here he is demonstrating his ability to shake hands. He gets so excited that he sits, stands, shakes, lies down, and repeats his repertoire until given his due.

Berry season has passed its peak and we're sliding down the wrong side of August now, but we'll still have berries for a few more weeks. I'll be there in the ditch, picking my breakfast like a bear.

Vicious garlic press designed to slice your palm

This garlic press pinches your palm when you squeeze it, making it painful to use. Did they try using the damned thing even once before they started manufacturing it? So much for German engineering.

"Specially Selected Potatoes"

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Marketers are quite aware that people are reading the ingredients on packaged poison food, and they've long since come up with more palatable euphemisms for things like monosodium glutamate.

But now canny marketers are not just exercising ploys to hide bad ingredients, they're also tarting up perfectly normal foods with nonsensical superlatives. For example, from a bag of Lay's Classic Potato Chips: "Specially selected potatoes". Specially selected for what qualities? Cheapest possible production costs? Minimal nutritional value? Highest possible pesticide concentrations? Most egregious carbon footprint? I'm guessing that maybe they mean they're selecting them for something positive, but the sheer meaninglessness of the phrase compromises the intent of ingredient disclosure: to factually inform the purchaser what is in the bag.

To expect the media to cover this trend would be naïve: they depend on the largess of corporate advertisers. To expect food merchants to properly educate the public is clearly not in their self interest. To expect politicians to do anything would be equally naïve: they won't even allow the prohibition of known poisons from food without extreme pressure, and they have campaign fundraising to worry about. The judiciary and the civil service may try to do the right thing, but they are routinely stymied. If we can't trust the labels, maybe we shouldn't buy their crappy packaged food at all.

The Carpenters remembered

How will The Carpenters be remembered in fifty years when their contemporaries are mostly gone? My guess is that they will be patron saints of the Scientologists, Raëlians and other UFO religions in eternal gratitude for their cover of the paen to World Contact Day: Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft. (The original groovy recording was by Klaatu featuring the groovy Mellotron.)

As for Karen Carpenter, Todd Haynes' banned masterpiece Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story will forever be considered the definitive account of her life and death, despite of (and because of) her brother's attempts at eradication; in contrast, the E! True Hollywood Story scarcely bears mention. The film is no longer in official circulation, but can be intermittently viewed online or purchased as part of a collection of illegal art (it sits proudly on my shelf).

Jaded

I find myself increasingly inured to the constant stream of animal cruelty cases ( slaughterhouse this, research lab that, teenage kids the other). My own intermittent vegetarianism is about gastric distress, and not about a conviction that animals don't deserve to be eaten: I don't see that. I consider it largely unnecessary, but not unethical, to eat animals. It is wrong to torture them. But why is it happening, and who bears responsibility for this?

Watching something like this video doesn't lessen my opinion of humanity – I have few illusions on that score. But it does strike me that our orgy of corporate greed, demanded by a billion avaricious investors intent on an ever larger return on investment, impels people to torture animals in this manner. The meat produced from downed animals is declared unsafe for human consumption, but the market's appetite won't stand still for safe and ethical practices. The cows' last hours of pain are stupidly cruel, but the people that are paid $8 per hour to brutalize old, dying factory-farmed cattle must suffer psychological problems, as must their families.

So, an aged cow screams; substandard meat is served to hungry schoolchildren; a worker becomes increasingly jaded to inducing eye-rolling bleats of agony; an extra eight percent of profit allows a better return on investment to a private equity fund managing the assets of the increasingly rich (but ever unsatisfied) ruling class, which eats free-range orgasmic Kobe beef and congratulates itself on being so very responsible.

Are you getting enough return on your investment? Maybe it's time to re-balance your portfolio. Call now.

LaCheese Gourmet

We had a gourmet experience yesterday, at the intersection of U.S. Highway 29 and I-94: we lunched at LaCheese.  We had seen the sign on our way to my folks' house, and had screamed in delirium, and my mom said that my cousin Mary had been talking about it as well (that sign is apparently quite the freak magnet).  So we got to meet the inventor of chili cheese fries, and we beat a fellow hipster to an irony-drenched saturated fat-fest.
The hostess was very friendly, though a bit deaf; when we asked for menus, she directed us toward the washroom.  It turns out that the adjacent gas station has no washrooms, as there are signs within the restaurant admonishing non-customers to buy something.

So we got seated and checked out the menu: pizza filled a third of it, and the most intriguing item was "LaCrust": cheese-stuffed double-layered pizza.  My mom asked for a salad (not on the menu) and the hostess (also the cook, bartender, and part-owner) offered to make her one with her ingredients on-hand: which turned out to be iceberg lettuce. I got a pepperoni pizza (playing it safe) but didn't go for the special: second pizza half-price, third pizza free! It was toaster-oven-bar-pizza, in the grand tradition of Tombstone. Mom and Dad got hamburgers (freshly microwaved) and Adolfo hit the jackpot with LaChicken.  Dad also ordered the MexiFries, which our hostess told us they had invented one night from ingredients on hand: french fries, taco "meat" and melted cheez goo. (Delicious, for the record.)

Perversion

It started out with a strange beverage choice. I was getting tired of drinking peppermint tea with sweet 'n' low (which here in Canada has cyclamate instead of saccharine), so I started drinking hot water. That's pretty disturbing, but it didn't stop there.

Tonight I came home wanting to eat, but not hungry. I walked through the grocery store and picked up things, but couldn't find anything that was worth a half hour on an exercise machine. So I came home and ate two grapefruit (enjoying them deeply) and then, for dessert, grabbed a bottle of grated horseradish. I've eaten a third of the bottle. It is delicious.