A headline in today’s Daily Mail Online reads, “Supermarkets are ALREADY selling festive products with shoppers urged to buy now and 'stock up' amid fears over Christmas food shortage due to gas crisis”. Another one reads, “Alok Sharma [Business Secretary] insists there is 'no immediate concern' … the supplies will be there for Christmas…”
I know what you’re thinking; you’d rather trust a supermarket than a politician, so there must be an imminent shortage and you must shop for Christmas without delay.
Nah. Let’s think this through, shall we?
What are supermarkets if not big businesses, whose purpose is to get you, the consumers, to part with as much of your money as soon as possible. To achieve this objective, they hire marketeers (not to be confused with musketeers who are far more chivalrous) to convince you to shop here and now not there and then. What better way to do this than to invent a story that if you don’t shop here and now, you’ll lose out.
Another trick up the marketeers’ sleeve is to convince you that their product provides unique benefits that can’t be found anywhere else, even though they can. One example is the Yankee Doodle Dandies who convinced, with the help of those who make their money by promoting the latest fad theories in nutrition, the Great British public that we’d all die a premature death if we didn’t eat blueberries. But they’re boring and insipid and not a patch on the Great British blackcurrant that is much tastier, just as nutritious and responsible for far fewer carbon miles (especially because they are easy to cultivate in an average British garden or allotment).
Then there’s the claim that it’s your basic human right to have something, even though we’d all be better off if you didn’t. Step forward the morally bereft aviation industry that has peddled the potion of pollution disguised as foreign holidays.
My favourite has to be the lie that you desperately need something and your life will be incomplete without it. Fabric softener springs to mind. All I found it was good for was clogging up my washing machine and making my laundry smell like a brothel’s entrance hall. You want nice-smelling fabrics? Hang them outside to dry. The aroma is as addictive as that of freshly cut grass.
The final example of marketeer mischief is just as appropriate for politicians. If you say something loud enough and often enough then people will believe it. In this case I have the French in my sights (no surprise there then). They are yelling from the rooftops to anyone who’ll listen, every minute of every day, that they was robbed by the Yanks, Aussies and Rosbifs, who are making boys’ nuclear toys without them. The fact that the French ignored Aussie concerns that their subs weren’t fit for a more aggressive Chinese purpose is an inconvenient truth close to presidential elections.
And of course the only ones benefitting from the Frenchy hissy fit are the Russians and Chinese. Is Macron such a little man that he can't see anything beyond the hem of his wife's mini skirts?
He desperately needs some musketeers to make him look big and important, both impossible tasks, especially as it was their job to protect the royal household (I love the film with Michael York and Gérard Depardieu), and Macron has sold himself (with a little help from his marketeers) as a devout republican.
But we all know he’d really love to be emperor, and he’d not be wearing any clothes.
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