"I just HAD to buy it..."

Went to WalMart for my weekend foray for necessities and a few non-necessities. On Saturday I had seen this TV ad with a woman casually talking about this neat outfit she was wearing, that she had gotten at WalMart... "Organics", a new line of environment friendly clothes that didn't require a drop of pesticides in reaching the stage of finished clothing. At WalMart. Gave the web address for it, too.

With my upcoming surgery Friday, I thought a nice light pair of black organic lounge pants might do nicely when I return to on-air work, assuming my leg is still healthily bandaged...so I began to snoop around...and snoop....and snoop...even in the ladies department just to see if they had this line...but there was nada, zip, zilch. I found an associate and asked her if they had the "Organics" line in a particular area, and I got the classic deer-in-the-headlight look, blinking eyes and all. She quickly asked a nearby associate who also gave that glassy, empty " I don't have any idea what you're talking about" look...and so they called a supervisor who quickly arrived and gave me my third resounding "Uh...what?"

Just found it odd that here was a TV ad campaign running in this market and this local supercenter had no knowledge of the ad, the "Organics" line, etc. I realize that not all stores will carry it, but when you run a regional or even national ad campaign and your very stores haven't the foggiest idea about it, you have a real marketing problem.

So I went to the website, and there it all was...kinda sorta...the page gave a place to enter your zip code to find a 'participating' WalMart...so I entered my zip...and here was the message I got upon clicking (yesterday and again today):

Sorry! The page you're looking for is either temporarily unavailable or no longer exists.

Good waste of expensive TV advertisement, if you ask me.

But it got better...in going through the grocery aisles, I thought about picking up a 12-pack of Diet Cokes, but the price was back up to it's $3.98 level which was not the best deal out there. However, in scanning the labels, there was one type of Coke product that was $1 less...one I hadn't seen before. Diet Coke Plus. (here we go...)

I burst out laughing in the aisle. Anyone who had thought I was crazy to begin with would have had all doubt removed. I am well aware that Diet Coke is an amalgam of chemicals that certainly are of no benefit to my body and arguably best avoided...until now. The picture speaks for itself.


Gosh, now I can be healthy drinking chemicals since it has been fortified "with vitamins and minerals"... Now, maybe you don't sense the extreme irony of it all, and it is rampant in our society at large, these buzz words and phrases that 'tell' you something is healthy. Far too few people take the time to read the nutrition label and list of ingredients, because if they did 3/4 of foods out there would disappear when noone would buy them. It's almost a guarantee that if a food is "fat-free" it has a high sugar content...and if it is "sugar-free" it has a higher fat content...the bulk of kids' cereals are notorious for being 'enriched' yet still carrying a too-high sugar level. Most fruit juices are a sham for that same reason (I'm primarily speaking of packaged drinks for kids on the go).

I can see it coming, to a neighborhood near us all...

"Mommy, can I have another doughnut?"

"Now Timmy, you know that's not the right word. We call it a 'sweetened bakery product' now."

"Well, can I have another? I know dinner is an hour away, but I'm hungry from playing all those video games!"

"Well, since they ARE fortified with vitamins and minerals, sure, you can have another...how can something that good be so bad?"