Economics for the Eco-nomics

Today a man asked me to rate his cologne. This was a bad move on his part not knowing 1 - I have a freakishly excellent sense of smell and 2 - am brutally honest. It was Abercrombie cologne. He was a grown man. I told him it registered about a 2 on my scale of pleasing smells and reminded me of teenage boys (at least I was honest?). I told him that few things are as irritatingly intoxicating as Abercrombie cologne. It doesn't smell bad, it's just noxious... like gasoline or paint, which is why you always leave that store a little lightheaded. He proceeded to ask for my phone number anyway. (In case you saw through his ploy like I did and were wondering...)

Back to smells. On the other end of the scale, however, are French fries, quite possibly one of the best smells/foods on earth (or at least they rank high in my meager, yet hungry opinion). French fries were in the news today. A story about Wendy's recreating their french fries to appeal to an increasingly "naturally" inclined food market.

"Natural," as they call it, simply means ingredients (more) resembling food - like the little plastic fruits they use for photographs and kids toys. It doesn't mean 'coming from earth'....

Unfortunately, the common consumer is fooled by this ploy, kind of like people who eat bagels and drink juice and think they are being healthy - I digress - that is a whole other blog in itself.

Well, what did Wendy's change you ask? They left the skins on (cha-ching$), cut the fries smaller (cha-ching$$), and started using sea salt (cha-chingering$$$). Not only did the marketing team finally catch on to the "natural" foods craze (Jack in the Box started this natural cut fry phenomenon a few years back...), but they found a way to make it profitable for them. Skins on means less production pealing them, smaller fries means more volume at a lower cost, and using sea salt means they get the same salt just with a fancier (and thus more valuable in the consumers mind) title. They are in no way healthier (in fact, they have even more calories and sodium than before), yet will be marketed as they are.

What Wendy's didn't think about is how the average Wendy's customer (inset left... is that bad? you know I'm right) probably isn't sitting in the drive thru thinking about whole foods and what type of vegetables are really in vegetable oil... (fyi, it's usually soybean) - which really just renders their entire campaign moot.

However, the silver lining is in the fact that the fast food companies are finally noticing the trend toward healthier, more wholesome foods. It may be one small step for profits - but its one giant leap for Skinny Bitches (like me). I've recently taken to the hype/common sense of eating food that is organic, humanely treated, and wholesome. A tricky predicament in our syrup laden culture... but lucky for me, and lucky for us, the green machine has been rearing to go for nearly two decades and in light of America's dim health outlook, the foundation has been put into place:

People want healthier food (demand) and it is profitable to cater to them (supply).