Holidays and consumerism

Because happy holidays and because I am being literally bombarded with all sorts of ads like "make your family happy, buy them this and that."

As already pointed out in pretty much all my previous posts, companies don't care about you. They don't care about your holidays. They don't care about your family's happiness. Everything they care about is money. They want your money, they want you to buy their products, so they sell you something they think you might like.

Oh, but wait. It's not even like that. They sell you something they convince you to like. Either by hiring a cool person for a shitload of money to tell you that what they're selling is cool. Or by making studies that say that you will respond positively to one stimulus or another (say... a naked chick in the rain. And then suddenly, behind her, a nice bottle of wine that suddenly you want to buy.)

It doesn't even matter whether or not the product is good. Every company's money is going more and more into marketing and sales and less and less into quality. It doesn't matter if the product is bad, what it matters is that you make it look good and then sell it. Yay, happy holidays and great bonuses to you all.

It would be great if we could all stop and think for a second. Stop and think before buying something and wondering "will this be of any use to me?". And, no, I am not one of those grinches that promote buying something only if it's practical. Something nice that makes you happy is of use to you. But does it make you happy in itself or does it make you happy because it feeds a need that was created by a very well thought out commercial?

I remember one of my first job interviews, back when I was young and naive. There was this woman asking me "Let's say that a restaurant receives a bad review because the reviewer sat at a table where the table cloth was dirty. What do you do?" My very childish answer was "You clean the tablecloth". But no, nowadays, it's not about that. Nowadays you have to run a marketing campaign to convince the public that the tablecloth is clean. Afterwards they'll be so convinced, it won't matter what the tablecloth looks like. Or at least that's what most companies think.

Will you prove them right this Christmas?