A note to the good people at General Mills

Submitted via web form Tuesday, January 8, 2013, and preserved here for posterity as a sterling example of my own peculiar variety of “breathless, raving, hysterical baloney.”

Just put six granola bars in the box. I’m sure your extensive psychological research and detailed behavioural studies and market testing and sinister backwoods mind control juju all demonstrate conclusively that you can make more money from the mouth-breathing rubes if you sell them a package sized for six units but only put five in the box; I know the packaging tells the rubes clearly and unambiguously, in several places, exactly what they’re getting; and I know every second I spend writing this is a second I won’t get back; but I’m begging you: strike a blow for common human decency. Put six in the box and charge what you need to. Every time an ordinary person, who should really know better by now but, as your money-extraction technicians have no doubt proven by way of a half-dozen exhaustive PowerPoint presentations, can’t really afford the brain cycles it would take to be actually vigilant with respect to the question of whether a box contains as much granola as it looks like it should, and therefore buys your product with the implicit, unexamined expectation he or she will get six bars, and then gets home and opens it and is just that tiniest bit betrayed and disappointed, you have eroded a single grain of honesty from the world and replaced it with a speck of pointless venality. It is disgusting. “It’s business.” It’s un-American. It’s loathsome. I am in absolute earnest, and it is only my certain knowledge that there is not the slightest possibility you will ever put six bars in the box that leads me to adopt such a facetious tone.

Well, at any rate this will surely brighten someone’s otherwise soulless corporate day.

Also: “Without limitation, General Mills shall exclusively own all now known or hereafter existing rights to the suggestions of every kind and nature throughout the Universe” is such perfect legal department claptrap, such breathless, raving, hysterical baloney. I particularly appreciate the capital U. Someone deserves a bonus.