Uninspiring Products

This may or may not be the day to do a brief piece more suitable for a Friday column, but I can't really say much about the news event of the morning the shooting in Florida, except that cooler heads will likely not prevail, and we will have a plethora of commentary focusing on one aspect of the case and ignoring the rest.  Me?  I figure if we couldn't do something in advance about someone who practically declared to the world he would do this, well, I've no idea where we go.

Today was actually "inspired" (and I use the term correctly) to write, by a can of olives.

Yes, I was.  I was in our local Lowe's when this happened.  Now, this is probably not the Lowe's you think, the hardware store.  That Lowe's is all over the country, and wherever you live, if you don't get your light bulbs and screwdrivers at Home Depot, you get them at Lowe's.

In the Carolinas, however, mostly east of Charlotte and north of Charleston, there is a large grocery chain that is also named "Lowe's", with no connection.  In the small town where we live, for example, there is one hardware Lowe's and two grocery Lowe's.  As you might guess, though, we have developed a verbal shorthand to distinguish them.

We refer to them as "Boys Lowe's" and "Girls Lowe's".  Take that, political correctness.

At any rate, the label on this can of olives had on it the inscription, "Inspired by Italian chefs."  Now, you know I am as likely as the next guy to stop and look carefully at something we are not meant to stop and look carefully at.  So I had to ask myself what, exactly, that was supposed to mean.

This was a can of olives, black pitted olives.  You make a can of olives by taking olives and putting them in a can.  No Italian chefs involved, just Marco and Giuseppe taking the olives off a tree, the olives going to a packing plant and going in a can.  Maybe the pits are removed by a machine.  No chefs.

What were we even subconsciously supposed to infer from that line, "Inspired by Italian chefs"?  That somehow the olives were gently put in the can the way Chef Boy-ar-dee would have done if he were supervising the packing process?  I don't know.

But it did get me thinking.  There is a brand of toothbrush out there, or maybe toothpaste, that runs TV commercials with a smiling voice-over adding the line "Inspired by dentists!" to the rest of the ad copy.  That one has always struck me.

Which dentists, exactly, inspired that toothbrush?  Most of us don't exactly associate dentists with anything positive; in fact, if my dentist inspired me to do anything, it would be to floss and brush so I never have to see him.  What does "inspired" even mean, exactly?  If a company decided to make a toothbrush, would they not first research what makes a good toothbrush?  How is one brand of toothbrush inspired any differently from another, all of whose inventors researched dental hygiene studies from, you know, dentists.

You know what was "inspired"?  Leonardo Da Vinci, when he painted, well, he was inspired by his subjects.  He was going to do something else, or paint someone else, when he was inspired by a woman, and we have Mona Lisa.  That's what we think of as inspiration, something out of the blue.  A great chef sees some tableau in nature that inspires a presentation of a particular dish.  That's inspiration.

I have seen or heard, in the last week alone, three different products telling me they were "inspired" by something.  Well, no.  They were going to make a product, and some stupid copywriter on Madison Avenue barfed up some trite phrase to sell it, that we weren't supposed to think about, but just let it drift through our subconscious.

I'm not inspired.  I just want a cup of coffee.

Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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