Tag: Stupid people

Disappearing Products

Corporate Fuckery, Marketing / Advertising

I read this story about the redoubtable Martha Stewart with some interest:

Homemaking mogul Martha Stewart recently revealed that she’s been using the same exact container of liquid eyeliner for 15 to 20 years – and some experts are sounding the alarm over the practice.

In a new makeup tutorial, which she demonstrated for Allure, the 83-year-old admitted that she rotates through five tubes of the discontinued T. LeClerc liquid eyeliners.

In order to keep them looking good, Stewart shared that she just adds water to them, and they haven’t dried out – yet.

Let’s just ignore the usual panic-mongering of “experts” because fuck ’em:  Our Martha doesn’t seem to be suffering any harm, and she’s 83 years old, so she can do whatever the hell she wants.

I am more interested in the fact that T. LeClerc (whoever they are) discontinued the lady’s favorite makeup, despite her ringing endorsement thereof.  And if the star power of Martha Stewart can’t stop a beloved brand from disappearing of the shelves, what chance do we mere mortals have when it comes to our favorite products disappearing into the ether?  Why, none at all.

Here’s my own tale of woe.

I have been using the same brand of deodorant ever since I was old enough to start needing it, i.e. early adolescence (70 minus 13 equals 57 years of continuous, unbroken use).  This is it:


…taken from my purchase history at Amazon in 2021, when I last purchased a case of the stuff — because it had completely disappeared from all supermarket- and drugstore shelves.  I suspected it was going to be problematic to reorder it, hence my large purchase.

And of course, my gloomy prediction has indeed come to pass, because when I searched for it recently, I got this foul note:

Well, it won’t.  I’ve searched high and low, and it’s gone.

Some brief history of the brand is in order, before I continue.

Old Spice is one of those flagship brands, once manufactured by Shulton, and subsequently purchased by the loathsome Procter & Gamble company (may their little Cincinnati nostrils rot).  Old Spice is a remnant of the “heritage” brands;  almost uniquely among male toiletries, the research showed that it was the brand most likely to be purchased by young men adopting their father’s favorite.  Indeed, the Old Spice Classic deodorant and aftershave (the latter in that distinctive little white bottle with the gray press-in top) can still be found in stores, and it was my Dad’s aftershave, the only one I can remember him using — hence when it came time to buy deodorant and aftershave, it was the brand I first sampled.

Unfortunately, the Classic didn’t work for me — it was too pungent, and it didn’t smell the same on me as it did on my Dad (#DifferentPhysiology).  Even my Mom noticed the difference.  So I did the next thing:  I tried a variant — at the time the only variant — of Old Spice, and discovered the “Fresh” label.

It fit me like a glove:  smelled great, worked well (even with the dreaded Teenage Hormones) and — if I may be indiscreet for a moment — it played no small part in my youthful seductions.  I smelled good, always, and still do.

That may not last, however, because with the Classic Fresh having disappeared, I now have to try to find its replacement.  And to date, I can’t.

I must have tried every Old Spice variant — and there are now fucking dozens of them — on the market.

Fucking hell, what a shit show.

I’ve tried them all, but none smell good, in fact the reverse.  And for those Alert Readers who spotted the “Fresh” variant at the end of the second pic, it may actually be the worst of the lot:  oily, pungent and just foul.  They changed the formulation.

In its own small way, this is just a replica of the Coke / New Coke / Classic Coke marketing fuckup of the 1980s, except that P&G (may their armpits rot) are never going to reissue the Fresh variant in its original formula because #P&GAreAssholes.

And I’ve also tried some Brands Not Old Spice, with horrifying results.  Yeccchhh.  And this experimentation is expensive because of Bidenflation, where instead of just paying a few bucks for a stick of deodorant, nowadays one has to get a credit check first.

I know that in the grand scheme of things, the travails of some Elderly White Guy trying to find a decent replacement deodorant are indeed small potatoes.  But it still gets up my nose — literally, in many cases — that after over five decades of loyal use, some cunt in Marketing (aided and abetted by some cunt in Finance) has decided that my beloved product is no longer viable, and has tossed it into the trashcan of history, and me along with it.

I need to get to the range.

When The Traffic Lights Stopped

Mocking Furriners, Politics

For a nation that’s supposedly laden with hard-headed common sense and a strong work ethic but is in fact more left-wing than anything else, Germany has slammed into the wall that bedevils similar political philosophies all over:  they’ve run out of other people’s money to spend.

And with what is so common among nations afflicted with a multi-party political system, their latest coalition government has therefore collapsed, crucified by essentially three factors: immigration (and growing popular resistance thereto), insane socio-economic policies fueled by Green eco-nonsense (e.g. an EV mandate which has led to closure of auto factories and concomitant unemployment), and a screaming insistence (via a cordon sanitaire* ) on preventing anything resembling a “Right-wing” party (the Alternative for Germany — AfD) from coming to power, either outright or even by parliamentary coalition.  In no small part, this is because the German Left persists in labeling anything not left-wing as “Nazi” or “fascist”, which tactic may be familiar to my Murkin Readers.

The Germans can’t embark on deficit spending so beloved of Leftist governments (e.g. the UK’s Labour Party and the U.S. Democrats), because the German constitution forbids it.  Even when they try all sorts of accounting legerdemain, the German courts wag their judicial finger and say, “Nein.”

Of course, the solution is simple:  firstly, end the flood of Merkel-enabled immigration (which is proving to be, surprise surprise, an economic drain on even the well-funded German welfare state, not to mention a social flashpoint as the Muslim immigrants are violent and not assimilating into the Kultur );  and secondly, the German government should end the slavish adherence to radical Green policies which, as anyone with common sense knows, are impractical, costly and doomed to failure.

Unfortunately, those initiatives seem to be precisely the two main policies of the AfD political platform.  Oops.

For a very clear analysis of all the above, feel free to wander over here.

And thennnnn… there is the looming prospect of a Trump Administration which will refuse to bankroll any of this shit, will insist on Germany spending more on their military NATO obligations (which they can’t afford to do)  — and all this with the Russo-Ukranian war raging right on their doorstep.

An historical aside:  the leftwing SDP (Social Democrat Party) has been a political disaster pretty much since its inception, despite being traditionally the largest political party in Germany.  They pretty much enabled Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s by refusing to participate in any centrist government coalition, and they remain a political speed bump to this day.

The Krauts are in deep shit:  rocks are meeting hard places all over the polity, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of eco-insane Socialists.

In this modern German context, a “cordon sanitaire”  is shorthand for “stop the AfD from coming to power, by any means necessary”.  Hence the parliamentary alliance between three parties with diametrically-opposed philosophies (that has just collapsed).

Leaving Their Market Behind

Bureaucracy, Drive Time, Marketing / Advertising, Technology

In his latest video, Harry Metcalfe takes aim at supercars — or to be more specific, their manufacturers — and their ballooning love affair with technology.

Now Harry lives in a different world from pretty much 99.99% of the rest of the world, because the market for the insanely-priced supercars is absolutely minuscule;  and his point is that the market is shrinking still more.

I don’t care about any of that, and I’d bet good money that pretty much none of my Readers could give a rat’s ass about it either, for all sorts of reasons:

  • we couldn’t afford the frigging cars even with a decent-sized lottery win;
  • even if we could, we have too much common sense to spend that amount of money on an asset that depreciates, on average, about 50% per annum, regardless of how many miles you drive the thing;
  • and lastly, we all shrink from the Nanny Technology that takes away from the pure enjoyment of driving (not to mention the intrusive data harvesting and so on, which I’ve ranted about before ad nauseam).

I’m not even going to talk about how fugly all these new super/hypercars look, because that’s also a frequent target for my rants on these pages.

Lest you couldn’t be bothered to spend half an hour in Harry’s company, let me illustrate his point about car depreciation by looking at a car we all know about:  the Bentley Continental GT convertible (GTC, for the cognoscenti ).  Here is the 2024 model, with its 4.0L V8:

I have to say, by the way, that it looks absolutely gorgeous:  very definitely a worthy successor to the 1930s “Blower” “Speed Six” Bentley which won Le Mans several times.  It’s price, however, does not look absolutely gorgeous:  $340,000 with only a few adornments.

Which is bad enough.  Now let’s look at its second-hand value.  Here’s a 2015 GTC:

Looks more like a limo than the 2024 model, but essentially it’s the same car (same engine, same luxury interior, etc. etc.) but with… 15,000 miles on the odometer (about 1,500 miles per annum of ownership).  Its price:  $90,000 (!!!).

All sorts of things come to mind, most of them unprintable anywhere except perhaps on this website.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  there is no justification — none — that can justify the prices of these upscale cars (and of the supercars we will not speak because Ferrari and the other thieves only make a few of them each year, thus ensuring their consistent “value proposition” — read:  snob appeal for the terminally-insecure rich).

Of course, the thieves (and their sycophantic customers) will cry out that it’s all the new  whizz-bang technology (“All hail Technology!!!”) that makes their cost of manufacture rocket into the stratosphere.

Unfortunately, as Metcalfe points out in his video, more and more people are looking at all that technology, what’s involved and how much money (not to mention weight) that it adds to the car, and are saying, “Eeeeehhhh I don’t think so, Luigi.”

Which, by the way, might account for this atrocity:

Looks like the More Money Than Sense crowd are taking the $340 grand they would have dropped on a new jazzed-up Bentley, and instead splurging it on a rebuilt version of Ferrari’s entry-level model of the 1970s.

At least the Dino is bereft of anything that could remotely resemble a micochip.

There is a companion piece to this post:  it’ll appear next week.

Unnecessary Advice

Elections, Politics

Via Insty, this:

Don’t Wear Your MAGA Hat to the Grocery Store Unless You’re Prepared to Defend Yourself

Note to the chattering classes:  I’m always prepared to defend myself.

IN fact, the reason I don’t wear a MAGA hat in public is because I don’t want to defend myself against some unhinged liberal asshole.

“You mean, a MAGA hat is worth more than a life?”

Anyone who would be foolish enough to attack me over so silly an issue has already made that decision.