Slashdot Mirror
Online Shopping: Hazardous To Junk Food's Health
Rambo Tribble writes "Reuters is reporting that the trend toward online shopping is reducing the sales of impulse-purchase items, most notably candy and snacks often displayed at the checkout counter. As even grocery shopping shifts online, junk food producers are feeling the squeeze. From the article: 'Anthony Hopper, chief executive of advertising agency Lowe Open, said brands need to change how people buy chocolate, but acknowledges that it won't be easy. "If you're somebody who on average buys one bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk on impulse once a week, can I encourage you that it's actually better value to buy a pack of four when you're doing your next online shop? It's a long-term strategy," he said.'"
besides, you could plan to buy one at a time.
if I'd buy four candybars and they would come in the mail I would eat them all! ALL! excuse me while I go raid the fridge for some kitkat.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Yeah, because it's something that everyone should be buying, despite the fact that:
so many are struggling financially
people want to live better and feel better
Right? It's got to be because of online shopping.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
People are getting poorer.
But don't mind my life experience.
Remember your home ec class? One of the lessons was to use a shopping list -- and stick to it -- in order to avoid impulse buys.
Well an online shopping cart is, for all intents and purposes, a shopping list. Looks like your home ec teacher was right all along.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
After that scene where he talks about eating fava beans with a light chianti, I figured he could make anything sound tasty. No surprise he ended up in food advertising.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
This comment was proudly brought to you by the Monsanto corporation.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
In fact, people who don't eat processed foods are extremely rare, even indigenous tribes devoid of modern technology process their food.
When people say to avoid processed food, they're not talking about some tribeswoman grinding it up with a mortar and pestle. They're talking about things like Cheez Whiz, which despite what you may think, is not a healthy food source.
Words you don't recognize, or even things that aren't "natural" aren't inherently bad, in fact most of them are fine to consume.
I'm sorry, but "most" isn't good enough. When you're talking about things that people stuff into their bodies, they damned well better all be fine to consume.
If you're somebody who on average buys one bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk on impulse once a week, can I encourage you that it's actually better value to buy a pack of four when you're doing your next online shop?
No. No, you cannot. Because:
1) Most people prone to impulse-buying your crap would eat it all the same day it arrives,
2) Impulse buyers tend to act on impulse, and wouldn't actually seek it out deliberately, and
3) People intentionally buying chocolate buy chocolate. Not your "HFCS, carob and soy lecithin" garbage.
Now, if we consider junk foods beyond just candy, let's consider margins of impulse-buys vs planned buys. I happen to like Doritos. Yeah, complete crap, and bad for me, but I intentionally (whether impulse or actually on the list) buy them every now and then.
As an impulse buy, I pay basically a buck for a 1.5oz bag of their crap. For two bucks, I can get a full-sized bag. So, Frito Lay needs to ask itself something - Can you afford to sell Doritos without the insane margins on your "vending-machine" sized packs? Or do those basically subsidize the price of "family packs" that you may well only sell for the purpose of keeping us "hooked"?
Because the same logic applies to almost every less-than-bulk sized junk-food out there. Sodas make a great example - a 20oz soda at the register costs MORE than a 2-liter bottle. A 3-pack of gum in the candy aisle costs less than a single pack of the same gum at the register. Can "impulse-buy"-centric companies actually afford to sell only their more economical sizes?
I've asked said people what they think of ascorbic acid, to which most of them effectively say they'd avoid anything containing it. Not a very good idea to completely shut out one of the most important amino acids from your diet.
Would you please show me the amino (NH2) group specific to aminoacids in the C6H8O6 molecula formula of the ascorbic acid?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Trace amounts of hydrogenated oil are harmless, but large quantities are probably not a good idea.
Gee, and guess what a lot of "processed foods" contain?
Large quantities of hydrogenated oils.
Foods you pick off of the vine contain these things.
In general, they contain trace amounts of bad things, and a large number of essential things.
Processed foods, OTOH, tend to include large amounts of bad things and omit many of the essential things you'd find growing on a vine.
The key is in the amounts, not whether they or not they can be detected in one food or another.
"If you're somebody who on average buys one bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk on impulse once a week, can I encourage you that it's actually better value to buy a pack of four when you're doing your next online shop? It's a long-term strategy,"
If you're somebody who on average buys one bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk on impulse once a week, can I encourage you to try some decent chocolate.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
On a 0..10 scale of problems to worry about, this ranks around 0.01.
The dynamics of on line food ordering could get interesting. Has anyone noted interesting suggestions from Amazon Fresh?
A truck driving friend of mine once sent me a photo of his delivery - pallets full of pharmaceuticals being delivered to a breakfast cereal plant in time for the sticky kids cereal batch run. The cereal box says "fortified with iron and vitamins". Why not just have the HEALTHY and NATURAL option of bran and sliced fruit? That's good for your colon, heart and tastebuds. Why? Because the advertising industry is employed by these food companies to brainwash kids (and apparently people like you) into believing this processed sticky shit is somehow healthy.
Perhaps you're actually better off not buying the junk food after all. You don't need to buy in bulk.
Even if it was, does the source of information make it any less true?
No, but the fact that ascorbic acid isn't an amino acid makes
sound, at best, like an odd combination of two sentences talking about different unrelated things.
You are saying "I am a vegan" as if it is a disease and not your own choice. Nobody is forcing you to be a vegan. If there aren't enough vegan products, the solution is simple: don't be one.
I am in a much more difficult situation myself: I only eat foods which contain meat. I have to tell you, no food producers and no restaurants are sensitive to my needs! Those bastards. I have been asking for meatball bread at my local Safeway for years, but they simply ignore me and laugh at me. Insensitive clods!
It's more likely that a large food processing factory will do several things with the carrots and broccoli...
1, use more of the spoiled/bad vegetables that most people would discard
2, use less vegetables and add more cheap filler materials to bulk out the product
3, use more fat, salt, msg etc to improve the flavor (which may have been ruined by the filler materials) in the cheapest way possible
4, replace other ingredients with cheaper substitutions wherever possible, again using more salt/fat/msg/etc to try and disguise the difference
If carrots and broccoli are sold in their original form you can see what they are, and you can see that unknown substances have not been mixed in to bulk them out. The same can't be said of a processed product, where the end result will usually make it very difficult if not impossible to identify the source ingredients and processes used.
Companies want to reduce costs in order to increase profits, and profits are considered far more important than customer satisfaction or health. Processed foods allow them to hide all manner of things that people would disapprove of and which might alter their purchasing decision. I doubt you'd buy a 200g pack of broccoli if it came with 50g of broccoli and a 150g blob of grey paste and instructions to blend them together and then reform it in broccoli shaped moulds to get the final product.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!