Just When You Think You’re On the Fringe

Mainstream society isn’t an easy thing to escape. The cues and cultural messages that we receive, which tell us how to live, what to want, etc. are hard to spot and even harder to deny.

So here I am trying to fight my way to the outskirts of consumerism, to the urban homestead, making my own pizza, canning, buying a giant box of baking soda to use as a cleaner, and then, I find this slideshow online, called Top 10 Products That Boomed During the Recession (it’s in the past tense because the recession started Sept. 08 and is now over, apparently (someone tell the commercial real estate market and the unemployment rate)).

What are these products? Iphones, Hybrid cars, golf clubs, and frozen pizza?

1. Arm&Hammer Baking Soda! Sales went up by double digits as people apparently switched over from expensive cleaners to natural and cheap. Shoot, ok, well what’s #2?
2. 3 product lines from Jarden Products. Coleman camping gear, Stren and Trilene fishing gear, and Ball canning jars. @#$% Fine, what’s next?
3. Hyundai cars. Yes! Ha! I did not buy a car last year.
4. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters’ Keurig single cup brewing systems, which are the coffee makers with the little creamer-looking pods that brew a yummy cup of coffee but are kinda wasteful. Their revenues were up 86%!
5. Monster Energy Drinks. Ha! No way, Monster! Sometimes a Monster truck (haha) pulls up at the train station and people dressed in Monster gear get in the back and start handing out free Monster drinks, creating a mob situation. I do not get one, because those things are terrifying.
6. National Presto Industries’ bestselling kitchen gizmos, which were: pizza oven, hot-air popcorn popper, and their various pressure cookers. Grumble. While I haven’t bought any of these things, the various strangers who advise me through the internet recommend or use them.
7. Treehouse foods, which sell under the store label (Safeway, Wal-Mart, Trader Joe’s) i.e. generic brands.
8. Hasbro Transformer’s products and movies. Dammit I went to that stupid Transformer’s army commercial. At least I didn’t buy the action figure.
9. Tupperware, especially their new line of oxygen-controlled containers for different vegetables, left-overs, etc.
10. Universal Electronics universal remotes for multiple electronics devices.

Company revenue reports tell a story of society. They’re telling us that we’re now using alternative cleaning products, making our own food more, bringing our own lunches (in Tupperware), canning more, camping more, and committing to our electronics by programming them all into one remote. I’m doing these things, you’re doing these things, we’re all doing these things. These are not fringe activities.