I was on the phone talking to my grandson today. He was at the bagel shop with his Mom and no doubt smelling the unparalleled mouthwatering aromas of freshly baked bagels when he said “I don’t think there’s anything more delicious than a bagel!” I agreed that it was one of the most perfect foods and he countered with “I wonder if we cut a hole in a piece of bread would it compare to a bagel!?” I said I doubted it. A bagel was a bagel and there were no substitutes. And that got me thinking about how many things are irreplaceable ‘one of a kind’ somethings that are just that? If you look in your grocery store you can easily see that manufacturers are constantly trying to outdo themselves. Make it round, make it square, stuff it with something, coat it with something else, put it in the toaster, put it in the microwave, mix it with something and bake it in the oven. I could go on and on but you get the point, right?
From crossover vehicles to designer dogs we are constantly reinventing things to make them more marketable or more palatable or more appealing to children or more nutritious for our elderly. The marketplace is a place of constant reinvention, discovery and innovation. Buy cards for every occasion and have you noticed there are more and more occasions? Well there have to be because the card makers can’t rely on birthdays, anniversaries and Christmas anymore to keep them financially robust! Ah such a skeptic! But it’s true. Have you ever wished for the ‘good old days’ when life was simpler, shopping was simpler, choices were less and maybe we were more satisfied. Not sure about that one but it’s something to think about. Could it be that the more things there are to choose from the more obsessed we are with those choices? The more brand conscious we become?
I was treating an adolescent girl some years ago and it seems that the majority of her fights with her mother revolved around such things as the brand of boots her girlfriends had and that her mother wouldn’t buy her. From that topic she went on to purses and cell phones. It seems theirs were better or cuter or more expensive than hers. Her mother, trying to ‘make ends meet’ was about to tear her hair out over all this! The girl was relentless and hysterical the mother entrenched and beleaguered. Of course changing society would have been harder than changing this family, but at times I wondered about that! I can see how if the world we lived in were simpler at least this particular manifestation of this child’s problem would have been simpler too!