nothing you can touch

Find a gap in the market and fill it, preferably in a more efficient manner than your competitors can manage.

That axiom might seem straightforward enough, but it can be highly problematic when applied to industrial capitalism's economies of scale. While you might make terrific profits upon unleashing a new must-have commodity, there comes a point where sales stagnate in the face of market saturation, and demand based on consumption and attrition falls well short of your corporate target.

If you have a stove in your home, you're not going to buy another unless it stops working somewhere down the line. Perfectly logical....until you consider that economy is driven by consumption, or more accurately the assumption of ever-escalating rates of consumption. Zero sum is a heretical concept and plateaus are where the losers go to die from falling share prices.

This is why there is such a thing as marketing. Not marketing in the simple sense of letting potential customers know what you're offering and where to obtain it, but marketing in the high-powered, arm-twisting sense of creating urgent demands where they wouldn't otherwise exist. There are many tools in the overarching arsenal -- such planned obsolescence (which has worked so well for the automotive industry and -- hahahaha -- BluRay), presenting minor tweaks as essential features (Hello, consumer electronics biz!), and broadening the perceived functionality of a product in a way that will convince folks to buy even more of it.

That last one is an especially favored tactic of the fine folks in the food industry. These purveyors of processed palate pleasers have never passed up a chance to turn an iffy medical study into a full court "this shit essential for your health" press or an opportunity to present some product-intensive nightmare as the cutting edge of suburban ranch home cuisine...

...which brings us to this ad from the late 1970's:

Yep, that's right. Miracle Whip Popsicles.

I am a man who likes his mayonnaise (with which Miracle Whip has a tenuous and contentious familial relationship). That mix of egg white, oil, and vinegar adds just the right tangy zing to a chicken or turkey sandwich, and when I was a wee lad, my favorite snack was mayo smeared on a slice of Wonder Bread. (Don't judge until you've walked a mile in my boots, 'kay?) I also know people who use mayo or Miracle Whip in less orthodox culinary ways, like as a dessert garnish.

That said, I can't imagine what it would be like to snack on a frozen block of mayo substitute crammed with frozen strawberries and mini marshmallows. I definitely do not want to imagine how such an unintuitive concoction would handle the long (or maybe not so long) trip through one's gastrointestinal tract.

I want to assume the strawberries would mellow the oil-vinegar melange, but given that someone thought that faux mayo-sicles would appeal to the masses, I can't assume anything. To paraphrase Bruno Bettelheim, "the cultural history of the 1970's is a nightmare from which we have just begun to awaken."

Psychedelic Furs - Pretty in Pink (from Talk Talk Talk, 1981) - The 80's, however, were pretty cool once you got past the rise of Big Conservatism and the constant fear of nuclear armageddon. The music was certainly better, at least during the first half of the decade.

(Note: I must confess a certain nervousness about composing today's post, as there is evidence that making fun of misguided foodstuffs from previous decades can turn a person into an unfunny, self-righteous, batshit foaming-at-the-mouth right-wing ideologue. I'm trusting that you, my dear readers, will hold an intervention should I start to succumb to that malady.)