Skip to main content

Consumer Reports

There has been a sci-fi magazine by this name for almost a 100 years in the US that provides a different type of literature than say reading 'Moby Dick' or 'Grapes of Wrath' or 'Bourne Identity'. It is a genre all its own.


A modern twist to this content has recently gained a cult following in the form of social.  Through apps designed to espouse the virtue and folly of everything from restaurants to cars to vacuum cleaners and service providers there are all sorts of twits and yelps that can be heard online.


People take this data and reports into account as a voice of consumer before deciding if they intend to consume the same stuff.  Mostly the answer is a resounding YES.  What else is a consumer going to do? 


You see all the reporting aside one thing that separates us from the rest of the world is the fact that we CONSUME.  Get it?


Rest of world's media can report on that conspicuous consumption and gawk.  No wonder they don't have time to be consumers themselves with all their time spent gawking at ours.


New rating scales are being designed to gage our consumption as a percentile of the rest of the world's.  Government is hard at work in its last days in office to ensure that even our homeless have safe access to at least the third generation of gently toasted ipads.  They will just have to strain their Retinas for another year until the new leadership has found a way to bridge this horrible gap in health services.


Headphones may or may not be available at the shelters depending on how many people with both ears intact would line up.   This will lead to some more disruptions of quiet streets as identified by the Boom Box Incidents of the 90s.

Comments

  1. Consume karte karte mar should be the motto of THE cosnumer nation. Govt is only to help you do that, at all cost.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

But What If We're Wrong?

I attempted to read this book by author Chuck Klosterman backward to forward but it started hurting my brain so I decided to stop and do it like any other publication in the English language.  Start from page 1 and move to the right. Witty, caustic and thought provoking this is a book you want to read if you believe that the status quo might, just might be wrong. At times bordering on being contrarian about most things around us it tries to zero in on the notion of what makes anything believable and certain in our minds.  The fact that there is a fact itself is ironic.  Something analogous to the idea that you can never predict the future because there is no future. Many books and movies have tried to play on this concept - best that I recollect (I think I am) was 'The Truman Show'.  This book by Klosterman attempts to provoke the reader to at least contemplate that what they think they know may be wrong. He uses examples like concept of gravity, and how it ...

You are important to us

Followed by piano music.   Followed by 'we are experiencing heavier than usual call volume'.  Sounds macabre like bleeding during menstruation or after a ghastly attack with a weapon on a hemophiliac.  Sorry Mrs. Johnson but it appears little Gertrude here has been bleeding heavier than usual what with her night time activities competing with the woodchucks in your neighborhood. Some services even go as far as to pick a random day to say - 'if you were to call us during the Chinese lunar month when the moon is axiomatically hugging the polar star with Jupiter intravenous when call volume is light'.  Well I will be damned.  I thought  I had checked with my astrologer before I placed this well focused call but  I guess this is what you get for listening to a quack. Umph! I am not sure which marketing genius came up with this personal touch concept of informing the caller that you are really a jackass for actually calling the customer serv...

Peru, South America - Week well spent

Growing up in India the only Peru I knew of was a tropical fruit (Guava for those whose lingua is English).   Not until high school did I discover that it was also a country in the South American continent. So it was this early April week that we decided to hit up Peru - the land of the once glorious Inca people that lived 500 years ago.  Today Peru is the third largest country on that continent with a diverse geography that stretches from the drier Pacific coast plains to the high mountains of the Andes and the Amazon river valley to its east. Our trip was primarily a pilgrimage of sorts to visit the last remaining, lost (now found and documented), large scale, mostly undamaged, city of the Inca nobility, called Machu Picchu (MP).  The Inca were great architects and builders.  MP is a UNESCO world heritage site affording it high visibility to the tourism trade and therefore crowded year round.  Our timing was not quite high season allowing us...