by Tdarcos » Wed Oct 12, 2011 5:04 pm
I did a rant over on Caltrops about stupidity in commercials, and someone demanded an example. so here's my reply, with exclusive additional comments not found there.
Here's an example of real stupidity in commercials.
GEICO runs a commercial where a husband and wife talk about what they did to save money. The couple admits they're not proud of what they did, but sushi is expensive. Their daughter comes in asking where her two pets are. They make all kinds of suggestions like looking under her bed, and she points out - holding an empty fish bowl - that they are fish.
The unstated implication is that her parents prepared and ate their daughter's two tropical fish. Now, is the television commercial claiming that they did this the one time because they are never going to have sushi again because of high costs and this will be The Last Sushi? I find that highly unlikely.
I mean, any analysis would tell even an imbecile that the cost of two tropical fish is much higher than the cost of sushi, presuming only two fish were enough to make a serving of sushi in the first place. I just looked it up. Yellowfin (a type of high-quality tuna) fillet is about $23 a pound. Now, as for live fish, even a guppy costs about $3.25, and other fish can cost anything you want to spend; some tropical fish can be $50 or $100 each and up. A typical tropical fish probably weighs one ounce at best. So to get enough material for even one pound of sushi is going to take about sixteen tropical fish.
I'm also ignoring that with fresh fish there are further losses because (as any wife who's handled her husband's catch from going fishing would know) you have to de-bone it, while processed fish is already boneless. But let's skew the cost to make fresh fish (the tropical fish) as cheap as I can while making commercial fish as expensive as possible to try and give some relevance to the commercial.
So, let's see, commercial sushi costs about $23 a pound. Hell, you can buy Surimi - it's a bland fish used for fake crab meat among other things - for perhaps $8 a pound in the snack bar at a grocery store, maybe less in packaged form. But let's use the more expensive price of yellowfin as primary example.
So, we have now determined that buying commercial sushi costs <i>at most</i> $23 a pound, and in all probability considerably less, if you wanted to save money you could use less expensive fish at probably $8 to $10 a pound. Using your kid's guppy - presuming you can use that for sushi - for fresh fish as sushi costs <i>at a minimum</i> about $52 a pound. Yeah, that's really a great way to save money!
The thing was, I realized this as soon as I watched the commercial, before I even knew what the actual costs were.
I did a rant over on Caltrops about stupidity in commercials, and someone demanded an example. so here's my reply, with exclusive additional comments not found there.
Here's an example of real stupidity in commercials.
GEICO runs a commercial where a husband and wife talk about what they did to save money. The couple admits they're not proud of what they did, but sushi is expensive. Their daughter comes in asking where her two pets are. They make all kinds of suggestions like looking under her bed, and she points out - holding an empty fish bowl - that they are fish.
The unstated implication is that her parents prepared and ate their daughter's two tropical fish. Now, is the television commercial claiming that they did this the one time because they are never going to have sushi again because of high costs and this will be [i]The Last Sushi?[/i] I find that highly unlikely.
I mean, any analysis would tell even an imbecile that the cost of two tropical fish is [i]much[/i] higher than the cost of sushi, presuming only two fish were enough to make a serving of sushi in the first place. I just looked it up. Yellowfin (a type of high-quality tuna) fillet is about $23 a pound. Now, as for live fish, even a guppy costs about $3.25, and other fish can cost anything you want to spend; some tropical fish can be $50 or $100 each and up. A typical tropical fish probably weighs one ounce at best. So to get enough material for even one pound of sushi is going to take about [i]sixteen[/i] tropical fish.
I'm also ignoring that with fresh fish there are further losses because (as any wife who's handled her husband's catch from going fishing would know) you have to de-bone it, while processed fish is already boneless. But let's skew the cost to make fresh fish (the tropical fish) as cheap as I can while making commercial fish as expensive as possible to try and give some relevance to the commercial.
So, let's see, commercial sushi costs about $23 a pound. Hell, you can buy Surimi - it's a bland fish used for fake crab meat among other things - for perhaps $8 a pound in the snack bar at a grocery store, maybe less in packaged form. But let's use the more expensive price of yellowfin as primary example.
So, we have now determined that buying commercial sushi costs <i>at most</i> $23 a pound, and in all probability considerably less, if you wanted to save money you could use less expensive fish at probably $8 to $10 a pound. Using your kid's guppy - presuming you can use that for sushi - for fresh fish as sushi costs <i>at a minimum</i> about $52 a pound. Yeah, that's really a great way to save money!
The thing was, I realized this as soon as I watched the commercial, before I even knew what the actual costs were.