Prunes

Yep, prunes. Prunes--the medium from which germinated the idea for a blog of curmudgeonly ranting about persuasion, pop culture, electronic communication, human nature, matters of the heart, the great cosmic scheme of things, and anything else I haven't thought of yet.

I'll never forget when I first saw the commercial--Sunsweet introducing and extolling an exciting new product that consumers would be unable to resist: individually wrapped prunes. I thought they had to be kidding. Why in the world do we need our prunes wrapped? To create more packaging for our starving landfills? (I should warn you that I have a "thing" about packaging.)

Was it to keep the uneaten prunes germ free for others in the household? Well, couldn't you just touch only the prune you want to eat? Under that theory, individually wrapped potato chips would be a good idea, too. Can you imagine your veggie platter if all those cauli-flowers were dressed in Saran Wrap? Will individually wrapped M&M's be next?

Maybe they wanted to protect our hands from getting sticky from handling the prune? Nah . . . think about it. If you take a naked prune out of the box, you're touching and holding it at the same time, right? Limited exposure. But if you have to remove and discard the wrapping, don't your grubby paws come into contact with more of the fruit in the course of the operation? Try it.

Maybe they wanted to make it easy to stuff a few prunes in a handbag or briefcase for a nice, healthy midday snack. But we have those cute little snack sized Ziploc bags, which you'd probably want to use anyway if you were planning to pack more than one prune. There's that pesky gratuitous packaging again!

Well, aren't new products good for the economy? I mean, someone had to design and manufacture the machinery that wrapped each prune and then stuffed the requisite quantity into those bags. Visions of Lucy and Ethel on an assembly line come to mind.

And then think of all the background work that went into developing this eagerly awaited product: facilitating focus groups, researching costs and forecasting sales, writing and shooting the commercials . . . I wonder how many jobs were created?

So let's see . . . we need to have the product to create the jobs to expand the economy so that everybody can afford to buy the product, and all we need to do is convince people that they need/want it, and then clean up after it. Gotta love the free enterprise system!