too many words by laura lemay

miracles of modern food marketing

Chiquita is rolling out a line of banana products to convenience stores. The new bananas will be single-serve, and packaged for freshness.

“Wait,” you may be thinking. “Bananas ALREADY ARE single serve and packaged for freshness.”

Ah, but you see, if you sell an individually packaged banana, you can charge a buck for it. Sell a bunch of naked bananas in the store and you have to charge much less. Its brilliant, really.

I was lying awake thinking about this last night, and I came to the conclusion that this is really a huge triumph of marketing. No longer do marketers need to be satisfied with convincing us to pay more for products based on questionable mythic properties (buy this beer and get laid, etc). Now they are managing to get us to pay more for features that the product grows with all on its own.

Its completely brilliant, really.

(I got it from Slashfood{.broken_link}.)