April 21st – It’s like this nothing for something business
culture we’re suffering from today; those ones like in designer coffee houses
where they have these signs saying;
‘This is our promise to you. When you buy our
coffee we promise to give you…’
and then go on to list all the obvious things but with an
edge that is supposed to make you, them, me, all one part of a great-big happy
family;
‘great coffee plucked delicately
from the rain-soaked, sun-drenched pod by laughing, indigenous workers who caress each bean to inbue it with love, infused with milk
eased away from the lanolined breast of a free-range, grass-fed cow and
sweetened with sugar grown in the sun-blessed, carefree cane farms of Barbados before
being sieved through a maiden’s pure silk stocking held in wrappers sealed by the
moisture taken from the inside thigh of a South American virgin…’
OK, OK, over the top and sexist…OK, I
back down from that and beg your forgiveness.
It’s as though they’d really like to give you shit coffee in a cracked cup served by a seriously grumpy, fag-wearing
slacker but, because it’s you, they’ll up their game and give you a truly uplifting
coffee experience… It’s just a coffee FFS! Don’t start waxing lyrical about it;
it’s just a cup of fuckin’ coffee.
It’s the same as the M&S ads, and
the banks telling us they’ll look after our money; well, will you REALLY; thank
god! I really thought you’d take my hard earned cash and piss it up the wall on
champers and risky deals…oh…hang on…maybe that wasn't such a good example, but
you can get my drift. Like those trucks that pound up and down the motorways
with the word logistics emblazoned
across them…logistics; basically it’s
picking something UP from HERE carrying it over THERE then putting it DOWN
again; and if it reads, Express Logistics then it’s doing exactly the same thing but faster. It’s the way language is misused
in order to confuse, bamboozle or deceive the public that is one of the great
crimes of our age; politicians have built a career on it. The belief is that, if you tell it like it is no one will
want to buy it, which is bollocks basically. If I need to buy bread I buy
bread. No amount of procrastination will make toast out of nothing…so, I buy
bread. Bread. Not;
A soft, fluffy confection of carefully sieved flour moulded gently by
the caring hands of our experienced patisseries’’
just fuckin’ bread.
Chuck that shit overboard. If you’re
prepared to tell it like it is, then good things can and will happen; take the
Payola scandals of the 1960’s. Basically it was common practice for record
companies to pay DJs to play songs. The bigger the recording company (and often
the more shit the act) the better they paid for their trite rubbish to be given
air-time on the radio. After this was discovered (I mean, hell, it only took
them 20 years) the shock horror reverberations (much like the HUAC hearings in
the film industry) caused ‘concerned citizens’ (who they?) to demand action
from the U.S.
On this day in 1960, Dick Clark, a DJ
of the time, testified that he took money and gifts to play records – (Wow!
Really?!) – estimating that at least 27% of his playlist was paid for in
industry back-handers and favours. Another prominent DJ and TV host, Alan
Freed, refused to admit that he took Payola, insisting that it was payment for
him being a consultant to the record industry. Mr. Clark told the truth. Mr. Freed
didn't.
Mr. Clark ’s career took off after these hearings. He never looked
back and had massive influence over the rock/pop genre. He lived a long and
happy life and died in his bed in 2012.
Mr. Freed’s career bottomed out after
this and never recovered, despite his previous massive influence and success.
No one would employ him and he went from bad to worse, dying of alcoholism in
1965.
So, there we have it. Proof that, if
you tell the truth about your coffee in plain language;
To bring you this coffee, we felled huge tracts of rain-forest then planted up alien, genetically-modified coffee trees using local labour who were
pushed off the land they owned and worked in the first place by us then
re-employed at a far from living wage and who we will keep on employing (until
the bottom drops out the market or we find a different industry to make a
profit from in which case we’ll make a gift of this now overused, under
protected and useless land back to the workers and fuck off out of it). We
harvested it with massive machines, thereby cutting down on any
labour-intensive operations thereby saving the wage-bill and cutting the price of the coffee we sell to the
middle-men who ramp the price back up again by spreading panic about bad harvests so that we can charge you, our faithful
customer, a premium for what is, ostensibly, a cup of hot water with 6 grams of
powder in it. That’ll be £2.50. Thanks.
Maybe people will still buy it; maybe
buy even more of it …
No comments:
Post a Comment