I don’t want to turn you into a jittery mess every time you go into a store, but please: go in mentally armed like you’re about to get interrogated by crooked cops for a kiddie porn crime you’re pretty sure you didn’t commit.
Here’s a historical rule of thumb: If Western culture gave birth to something between 1889 and 1914, handle it like a grenade wrapped in a uranium protective sheath. That’s the era from the Paris Exhibition of 1889 with its Eiffel Tower to the outbreak of World War I.
Modernism, Jacques Barzun observes, “rightly belongs to those twenty-five years [1889-1914] in which nearly every idea in the twentieth century was hatched.” A Stroll with William James.
This applies to marketing and advertising.
During this era, marketing definitively shifted from “informational” to “manipulative.” The first proto-Don Drapers were discovering that you could actually convince people to buy stuff they didn’t need. From there, the marketing industry snowballed quickly. By the 1920s, Edward Bernays was showing that, not only could you convince people to buy stuff they didn’t need or even want, but you could convince them they wanted stuff they didn’t want.
“The [1890s] saw the rise of the craft [of advertising] as we know it: the arresting display in type and picture with repetitious slogans and extravagant claims: Post Toasties, the first breakfast cereal, would cure appendicitis; contraptions with wires implying electric power would relieve lumbago and housemaid’s knee. . . . Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence.
The sons-of-bitches have been perfecting the approach over the past 100 years. You can’t walk into a brick-and-mortar store without being attacked by silent marketing gremlins.
One of the marketing SoBs’ fundamental rules: Put stuff most suited for impulse buys at the checkout counter. If it’s at the checkout counter, it probably sucks. I mean, honestly, if cigarette packs have to display that worn-out Surgeon General warning, convenience stores oughtta be required to post signs that say, “We’re Awful People to Be Playing On Your Impulse Buy Psyche Right Now.”
But alas, the convenience store lobby today is stronger than the tobacco lobby in the 1960s, so we have no such warnings.
And products like $9 bottles of Feel Free fly off the shelves like flat-screen TVs during a Black Lives Matter mostly peaceful protest.
What’s Feel Free? It’s a two-ounce bottle of fun and productivity. It makes it easier to study and socialize, which, for a college student, are the only two things that matter. It also contains a healthy dose of kratom, which is pretty dang addictive, prompting some to refer to Feel Free as “gas station heroin.”
And so a few folks got hooked. “Colin” says he was drinking eight every day even though the label told him not to do more than one per day.
It’s awful, but I kinda feel about this like I do about the Cornell 7 and She Who Was Too Skanky Even for a Fraternity House: To heck with the lot of them. They’re all reprobates whose collective moral compasses aren’t worth the ink spilled on this story.
I feel bad for Colin, but come on, dude: The actual drug pusher himself told you to stop at one per day. It’s hard to muster much sympathy.
I get it: He’s young, his prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed yet, he’s “old enough to kill but not for drinkin’” (Barry McGuire). But use common sense. Don’t do a drunken threesome in a frat house and get shocked when the other Cornell Hells Angels pile on and don’t drink multiple bottles of Feel Free every day.