Why I Stopped Drinking Coke

We all know that we should not believe any sales advertising. Aunt Martha told me this, many years ago. If there ever was any truth in advertising, it has long ago been watered down to misleading the great unwashed with unsupported facts ( I think they call them factoids) and the misuse of terms that we used to hold as guidelines to quality and quantity. Now, commercials have been upgraded to infomercials, some concoction of factoids and whimsy designed to attract the unwary.

In the move to get us all eating a more healthful diet, we are on the watch for all things green and organic. It may come as a great surprise to the people who write advertising copy that carrots and potatoes were always organic. But some person who has never seen a garden and sits in a cubicle in a skyscraper somewhere in New York or Toronto thinks that Chi Ping Importers will sell more carrots if they plaster the word ‘organic’ on the packaging. It worked for the apples they sold last month, why not try the carrots?

Salt is now bad for you, so they advertise 40% less salt on the potato chips. This would be a good thing but the cooks at Chips R Us have added flavour enhancers that will, in the next release from Health Canada, be another banned substance, far worse than sea salt. It seems that the poly-mono-saturated-hypo-potash-chloro-flurons are not good for the lab rats, causing severe indigestion and feelings of claustrophobia in four out of seven rats nine times out of ten. This is similar to the 30% less butter advertised on the popping corn packages: what they did not tell you was that Orville never used butter in the first place – it was some chemical mixture that would not turn rancid in the best-before date, as butter surely would. The advertisers could have said 100% less butter but some popcorn eaters would balk at this, wanting that yellow stuff on their popcorn.

My favourites are those banners on packages claiming 10% more, which to the unwary, sounds like a real deal. The trick here is to look on the shelf below the product and read the cost per unit. After doing a conversion from Imperial measure to metric with your handy shopping calculator, you find that you are paying the same old price. Or better still, you find that you now have to use 10% more of that laundry soap to do the same cleaning as the old packaging because the 10% was ‘filler’.

The problem with all this misleading advertising is that every once in a while some naïve company tells you the truth in their advertising. It is very confusing. It is enough to keep one awake at night, worrying about the whole issue of truth in advertising. Then on a late night infomercial you listen to some bright-eyed young thing telling you about a sleep aid. However, after you hear the caveats that now accompany drug ads, you would rather be sleepless in North Bay than risk convulsions or homophobic nightmares that one in 999 people experienced in a trial test. Thank heavens that my doctor does not read all those warnings on the medications she prescribes me! If she did, she would be telling me to eat more organic carrots and reduced-salt potato chips.

Most of us have learned that the advertised fuel economy of a vehicle is nowhere near what happens in real life, however every once in awhile you see some guy nursing his new Buick along at 70 kph in the 100 zone trying to reach that perfect number that only lab rats on a treadmill can attain. This is not unlike using four of those little new $4.99 fluorescent bulbs to get the same light formerly given off by one 60 watt bulb that you bought for 49 cents. At least filling the landfill with all the old unused incandescent bulbs will not be as bad for the environment as those new bulbs with their small amount of mercury. Besides the new energy-efficient bulbs will last ten times as long as the old bulbs – it says so right on the package. This must be important because I have bulbs in my house that have endured over twenty years – just think – light bulb that will last 200 years! I need those.

As for the distributors of that flavoured water called Coke, it is not so much the contents of their bottles and tins that bothers me but their advertising. Despite my complaints, mostly to my wife, they continue to show that ad with the polar bears and the penguins. Cute that the bears should share a bottle of Coke and not eat the penguins but anyone who ever opened a book in grade school or even a National Geographic magazine knows very well that there are no penguins at the North Pole and no polar bears at the South Pole! I know the ad was not designed to look like the New York zoo because the Big Dipper is in the wrong place, but come on Coca Cola folks, give us a little credit. If you consider your customers to be so dumb, maybe there is a reason why they are switching to Pepsi!

Walton One, Coke Zero.