happiness and sunshine.

by phill

Zoe showed me this quite strange packaging decision on Friday, and I just got the picture off my camera phone to share with you:

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That’s a Coca Cola can. Diet, to be precise. If you can’t read the label because of my terrible camera phone, it reads:

“Listen closely and you can hear the happiness being unleashed when you open this can.”

Now I can understand a little old corner shop with a home-brew ginger ale or lemon squash putting something like that on their recycled, handwashed bottles they sell to passing by strangers and country folk alike. But coke? Motherfucking coke? I’m pretty sure that the world is particularly unhappy with carbon dioxide at the moment, and you’re saying it’s pure happiness that’s come out of an aluminium can to light my day? I’m also slightly confused by the wording. Being ‘unleashed’ isn’t something that I generally believe that happiness would do if left to its own devices. In my head, it may frollick, or bound, or lay at your feet look extraordinarily pleased with itself (yes, in my head, happiness is a puppy with huge feet). But being unleashed is something for a muscley freak with a sword, or—if we’re going for abstract emotions—pure, unbridle fury to do. Of course what’s probably happened is that they had a little space to fill on their can and decided that hell, what the hey, let’s try and pass off some bullshit on the consumer that buys this stuff to read the label. Incredible. Of course, if Diet Coke delivers happiness, I can’t wait to listen to my chocolate and hear mild depression.

A long time ago I found this one on the inside of an egg carton and have kept it on my bedroom wardrobe ever since:

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Again, if you’ll forgive my camera phone, the text reads thusly:

“Pioneer Farms Free Range Eggs, have been laid by really happy free range chickens who get to run around freely and are able to relax in the sun.

Pioneer Farms Free Range Eggs are a great source of protein and contain a range of vitamins, minerals and folates including selenium, calcium and iron. Naturally they may also contain a residue of Western Australian sunshine.“

I’d like to direct your attention to the bits highlighted in bold. Let’s run through a quick check list of things that don’t make sense:

  1. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a chicken relaxing in the sun. Scratching at the dirt or walking around aimlessly, yes. Relaxing, no;
  2. I’m pretty sure that it’s impossible to tell when a chicken is ‘really happy’. To me, a chicken is either fed, unfed, looking for sex, or taking a crap;
  3. Also, if you are applying a label of ‘really happy’ to an entire farm’s-worth of chickens, don’t you think that maybe, just like in a normal work environment, there might be a couple of workers in the flock that are depressed, or suicidal? Generalisations such as this hurt the people who don’t fit into them, so perhaps its time to hire a chicken psychologist and make sure that your callous labelling of all your chickens as ‘really happy’ isn’t driving someone, er, some chicken, to despair;
  4. And even if they were of a generally higher standard of job satisfaction, they still have to squeeze an egg out more often than they’d prefer because you wouldn’t be able to fill so many egg cartons otherwise;
  5. Sunshine doesn’t fit in eggs. Unborn chicken fetuses fit in eggs, but sunshine doesn’t.

Anyone else got some ridiculous advertisement or packaging they can point to?

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