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Krava-hydrates

jonathan — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 09:00:40 +0000

We are happy cows: the new cereal from Kelloggs

Breakfast for me is a serious business: it’s got to be slow release, with protein, and low GI. I’m not an ascetic, I just like food too much: I’d no more eat a Twix for breakfast than I would for dinner. For this reason, I have completely ignored the high-stacked boxes of Kellogg’s new cereal Krave: you might just as well crumble some chocolate digestives into a glass of milk. Easy to see what the concept is, though: if the chocolate was on the outside, you’d think it was candy. Put the chocolate inside, and it’s a breakfast cereal.

But then last night, I saw a couple in my local Tesco laughing their heads off at the display, picking up a box, examining it and saying ‘That’s so funny.” As they put the box back and left, I just heard the tail end of a sentence “….I wonder…East Europeans”.

I looked again to see what could have been so funny, and mentally factored in the last two words I heard, East European. Then a slavic penny dropped. For in many East European languages (Slovakian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, for example), krava means ‘cow’. In Croatian and a few other languages, Krave (pronounced |kráh-veh, as in ‘Ave Maria’) is the plural, ‘cows’. So there you have it: Cows the new cereal from Kelloggs. For the sake of balance and fairness, I should tell you that when I was shopping in Belgrade about 30 years ago, I noticed a brand of fly-killer called Bum!

Coincidentally, I find food retail fascinating. Reading about Krave from Talking Retail you’ll find that the aim is to meet a market for people who don’t really want breakfast but, erm, uh, OK, I’ll have some chocolate. These aren’t children, by the way, they’re 16-25 year olds, and one of the target groups is music festivals and University students. ‘ “There’s a huge opportunity to grow breakfast and cereal consumption within the adult market by retaining young adults in the habit of eating breakfast,” said Mike Taylor, Kellogg’s sales director.’ An idea of how the big social marketing campaign for Krave has gone down with students can be gauged from responses to it in The Student Room. Nice to see that Universities are producing independent critical thought.

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InvisibleHand add-on for Firefox

jonathan — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 09:11:16 +0000

If you use Firefox and do internet shopping, Invisible Hand is a great add-on. It sits there quietly and unnoticed in your add-ons in Firefox, until you start looking at a product on the web that it has found cheaper somewhere else. Up comes a discreet yellow bar at the top of your screen telling you where to go to get it, and any other price offers, as in the screenshot below, where it turns out Asda have a better price on an academic text book than Amazon.

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Give your money to charity, not Sainsburys

jonathan — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 12:31:42 +0000

Misleading? Courgette pricing in Sainsburys

It often strikes me that a good way to collect money for charity would be to stand outside Starbucks or Caffè Nero and invite people to donate the £2 or so that they were going to spend on a latte on people and causes that needed that £2 much more than you really need a coffee and a sit-down. However, I like my Caffè Nero, and I can’t get holier-than-thou over it.

So I’ve come up with a better idea: buy your courgettes loose from Sainsburys, and give the money you save to anyone you like, except Mr & Mrs Sainsbury. Confused? Look at the picture above which was taken on Thursday morning at Sainsburys in Tooting. On the left, a 500g pack of courgettes costs £1.78. On the right, a kilo of courgettes (loose) costs £1.84. So 500g of courgettes from the loose box would cost you 92p – which is 96p less than buying them in a packet. That’s nearly a whole pound you’re giving to Sainsburys which you could put towards coffee, or charity – you decide.

I had to stare at those signs for two minutes before I could work out what was going on, and then had to photograph them to be sure I hadn’t made a mistake. Two signs, four figures, two font sizes, and four means of comparison: on the left, the big number is price per pack, with the price per kilo printed in a size and position that is appropriate for cats with 20/20 vision. On the right, the big price is price per kilo, with the cat-friendly font dedicated to price per pound. So in fact, you’ve got four things to compare, and the two vital comparators (price per kilo) are not displayed at the same hierarchic level. If you don’t or can’t read the small print, you might think that the ones on the left are cheaper – after all, it’s £1.78 compared to £1.84. The price for not doing the maths is to pay £3.56 per kilo for a courgette as opposed to £1.84, or nearly double.

Latte anyone?

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They don’t make them like this anymore

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Labour party street-spam in Tooting

jonathan — Sat, 09 Apr 2005 08:46:24 +0000

Now you all know how much I love Tooting, and especially the terrific range of sweet shops, grocers and greengrocers. The glory of this area is its freedom from chain-stores and supermarkets, and the unique, colourful displays that each shop has. Even the pound shops look quaint. This is a high-street that looks like its owned by its community.

Until the other day, that is, when one of the largest shops on Upper Tooting Road was taken over by the labour party, and turned into a political campaign on a street corner.

This ugly, pointless, loud display is the worst thing to have blotted the Tooting landscape in the 15-odd years that I’ve lived here, and shame on the Labour party for ruining my local high street in such an opportunist, heavy-handed and thoughtless way.

Whatever Labour’s intentions, this bit of street-spam says to me that Labour have no understanding of local issues, no thought for the community, no interest in preserving the high street, no sense of decorum; it’s humourless, colourless, top-heavy, loud-mouthed and insensitive. Yeah, well I’ve changed my view about that since I first wrote this post. I have to say that I’m impressed with Sadiq Khan, now that I’ve had opportunities to meet him and see him in action – like his support of the Save the RACS building campaign, for example.

What annoys me is not the politics – I probably lean further to the left than anywhere else – but the lack of imagination and creativity. If a greengrocer can display apples and oranges in an appealing way, surely local MPs & councillors should learn a few tricks from their constituents, and present policies with similar panache?

Fortunately, you can report a gripe on the Wandsworth Labour Party page. “Has a streetlight been broken for ages? A fly-tip still not been cleaned up? Pavement uneven or road potholed? Abandoned car getting vandalised? Let us know and we’ll get the council to sort it out!” they ask. Unfortunately, they don’t offer to sort things out when a national political party turns one of your local shops into an enormous billboard, covered in slogans and posters.

Disclaimer: I use street-spam to mean any form of ‘vertical litter’, whether legal or illegal, not in the specific sense of illegal bill-posting used by Citizens Against Ugly Street Spam.

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