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The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.


8:30am on Monday, 4th April, 2005:

Super Value

Comment

I know it's a little passé, but here in the Bartle household we still get our milk delivered every morning. Well, every other morning — they don't come on Tuesday, Thursday or Sunday, and only deliver one point (instead of the usual two) on Friday. Occasionally, left with the milk will be an advertising leaflet, attempting to persuade staunch milk-drinkers to expand their notions of doorstep delivery into wider areas of commerce.

This morning we got the follow card, a classic of its kind:



Who are Hurstwoods targeting with this?

Firstly, it says "milkman", which is as unreconstructedly sexist as "dinner ladies" ("She called on Tony Blair to go into schools and 'get his hands dirty' as a dinner lady.").

Secondly, it quotes weights in grams, not kilograms. To people not versed in metric measurements, "1300g" sounds much more impressive than "1.3kg". Missing the comma out (it should be "1,300g") makes it even more mysterious.

Thirdly (and the reason I didn't rescale the image), look at the words on the boxes. These are broken biscuits. The same is repeated in the easy-to-ignore blue writing below the hard-to-ignore "only £2.59" splash. £2.59 for 1kg of broken chocolate biscuits.

Old-fashioned language, oddly-represented metric units, eyesight-challenging yet critical product description notes... My guess is they're aiming to sell these to pensioners.

Oh well, I suppose broken biscuits are easier to chew.


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Copyright © 2005 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).