Smarmy Jerkface Dot Com

Hippie juice makers Sobe recently entered the lucrative "enhanced bottled water" arena, looking to get a piece of Glaceau’s mighty Vitamin Water empire.

Last night for the Super Bowl they spent a ton of money for a long, pointless commercial spot featuring Naomi Campbell and a bunch of CGI lizards dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Sobe also sponsored the halftime show report.

They should have used that money on making a better product.

I’ve seen Sobe’s Life Water in stores but never bought any until just recently when Target was practically giving it away at 50 cents per bottle.  The colors and flavors are similar to what Vitamin Water offers, but looking at the labels I noticed two distinct differences.  The first is that Life Water contains slightly less sugar than Vitamin Water does, which can be good news for those of you counting calories or watching your sugar intake.  The second is that Life Water contains sodium (Vitamin Water is sodium-free).

And even though it might be a negligable amount of sodium, Life Water has a bit of a salty taste to me.  Other than that, it tastes like watered down Kool-Aid that wasn’t mixed with enough sugar.  Some of the flavors are tolerable, but none are particularly enjoyable.  I’ll be sticking with Glaceau’s product.  Sorry hippies.

Something strange has been going on lately at our local Taco Bell establishments.

Recently, someone has decided that the drive thru conversations needed a total shake-up, and the change doesn’t seem to be for the better.  Or for the quicker.

When I’ve pulled up to the speaker box, the first thing I am greeted with is "Hi!  How are you today?"  This has already extended the length of time you’ll be at the speaker because typically your response will be something like "Fine thanks" or "Good, and you?".

This is not how it should work at drive thrus.  If you want to greet me when I walk up to the register in your store that’s one thing, that’s human interaction.  But doing it through a speaker box is just wasting time.  If I wanted to meet and greet with you, I’d come inside.

Now if I say "Fine thanks", the person on the other end says nothing, waiting a full 15-20 seconds or so before finally saying "Great!  Please go ahead with your order."  If I say "Good, and you?" (which is instinctively what I usually say) they’ll eventually reply with something like "I’m good, thank you" and then nothing, again pausing for 15-20 seconds before saying "Go ahead with your order".

So I’ll place my order, but have found that if you don’t conclude your order by saying "and that’s all", the person will not respond for a good 30 seconds or so.  If you give your order and just stop talking, they will wait almost half a minute before saying "will that complete your order?"  YES!  Hence why I stopped talking!!

Once I arrive at the actual window, the "conversation" takes another bizarro turn.  Suddenly I become "baby" and "honey" to the person taking my money.  They’re all "Thank you honey" and "do you want any hot sauce baby?" and "It’ll be just a moment longer sugar".  Have they all gone through southern belle training or something?  The hell?

This has happened to me at three different local Taco Bells.  Is this some sort of goofy corporate mandate that all drive thru order takers have to make the whole process awkward?  I just want my stomach ailment food.

So this Vitamin Water stuff must be pretty popular if Winn-Dixie has already created their own knock off brand of it…

I was grocery shopping on Monday and when I got to the water to pick up more of my new favorite beverage I noticed that Winn-Dixie had their own generic vitamin water, cleverly called V-H20 (or "vitamin water", if you can crack the code).

I compared its label to the appropriate flavor of Vitamin Water and noticed that the ingredients were just about identical, except that Winn-Dixie’s brand seems to contain a smidge of salt, as the nutritional info on the label lists 1% sodium.  Vitamin Water doesn’t contain any sodium.

Also, the Vitamin Water version includes potassium, whereas the Winn-Dixie brand does not.  So heads up if you’re in need of maintaining your body’s fluid and electrolyte balance (see, I sound like I know what I’m talking about don’t I?  Thanks wikipedia!).

The only other difference is that Winn-Dixie’s version was 50 cents cheaper per bottle.  But if you shop around you can usually find the real stuff on sale for the same price.

A little over two months ago, I decided to end my lifelong relationship with soda.

I was probably drinking close to a 2 liter’s worth of soda per day.  I felt like I needed it.  I needed it to wake up, I needed it to stay awake, I needed it with meals, and I needed it when I felt thirsty.

What I didn’t need were all the calories, sugar, and headaches that would come when I’d go without for a few hours.

So I did it.  I quit cold turkey.  Which I’m not told you’re not really supposed to do.  But whatever, I quit.  And for about a week I had the worst headache I’ve ever had in my life.  I thought it would never go away.  But it did.

My main fear about eliminating soda from my life wasn’t the potential headache though, it was being able to find something delicious to
replace it with.  I drink water, but I can’t drink it all the time
because it just doesn’t taste great.  A couple years ago I went the
diet soda route, but that’s not an option anymore because there’s still
the caffeine to deal with and I started having harsh reactions to
artificial sweeteners.

So I found this beverage called Vitamin Water made by a company called Glaceau.  It tastes like watered down Gatorade, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  It’s great stuff, and I now swear by it.  If I could own stock in them, I would.  And the company seems to be taking off.

While this wasn’t necessarily a dietary decision, there have already been notable health benefits to this.  Just in the last month or so, I’ve lost 11 pounds.  And I rarely have headaches anymore.  All because I stopped drinking soda.  Man that was easy, in the grand scheme of things.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an entry about my disgust over the new Vegetable Thins snack crackers and how they’ve been changed.  I then took that entry to the Nabisco website and sent it in as a comment about their new product.

Less than a day later, they wrote back:

Thank you for visiting http://www.nabiscoworld.com.

Kim
Associate Director, Consumer Relations

Now when you hear the word reimbursement you think refund, yes?  So did I.  Over the weekend I received my "reimbursement", which turned out to be a coupon for a free Nabisco product of my choice (not to exceed $3.50).

Well, I can’t really complain at this point.  At least it was something.  Now off I go to get a box of my favorite Doo Dads snack mix.  Wait, they don’t make those anymore either?  Son of a bitch…

Why not continue the anger?

Dear Nabisco,

When I was just a lad, my family would gather every summer for a giant-sized family reunion.  My great uncle worked for your company, and every year he’d bring along every variety of snack cracker you made.  Varieties that were not available in many of our small towns.  And my favorite was a product called Vegetable Thins.

As a result, I have been a loyal buyer of said snack for a couple of decades now.  And so you can imagine my distress upon seeing this product in stores recently with the words "GREAT NEW RECIPE!" splashed on the box and an obvious change to the style of the snack as well.

Not being the type to reject change blindly, I purchased one of the new boxes that promised greatness.  Your box lied.  The changes to the product are not for the better, and I want to see the quotes from the focus groups who tested these things to find out who in their right mind called this new recipe "great".  They’re borderline flavorless at this point, with none of the, well… "zip" that they used to have.

Less important but yet still different is the change in shape of the cracker.  All my life they’ve been shaped like vegetables.  Now they’re just generic squares with either concave or convex curves on two sides.  Boring.  Now apparently they were this shape when first introduced, and are also this new shape in Canada.  I don’t care.  They’ve always been shaped like vegetables to me, and I want them returned to said shape.  Pronto.

Look, if the old recipe caused ass cancer or something, quite frankly I don’t even care.  Just slap a surgeon’s general warning on there and put the old product back on shelves.  Let me make the choice, because this new product of yours is terrible and I will never purchase it again.  It’s flavorless, textureless, and just plain boring to look at.

Sincerely,

dvdguy
Executive Creative Director – The-Watercooler.com

Despite all the setbacks I’ve had along the way in this crazy journey called… called… okay, however the rest of that thing goes, I’ve managed to remain an optimist.  A somewhat bitter optimist, but an optimist nonetheless.

That’s why on a hot and happenin’ Friday night I didn’t sink completely into the depths of despair when I saw that we were heading into some fruity looking store called World Market.

Oh sure, I wanted to put the brakes on and fake an incoming phone call so I could remain outside for the duration of the visit.  But I’m a trooper.  An optimistic trooper.  So I walked into that so-called store and managed to keep my dinner down as knick-knacks of all shapes and sizes were admired and pawed at.

But then we got to the back of the store, where knick-knacks were replaced by classic candy and foods from around the world (hence the name of the store, I would imagine).  This was moderately entertaining, and made the trip somewhat tolerable.

Everything changed for the better though once I looked down into a basket that was next to me.

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