A Morality Tale Concerning Vinegar

This isn’t exactly about creative writing, but as a writer, I consider it a morality tale about the state of the modern world.

Here’s the thing: for as long as I can remember, Sarsons have made vinegar in a convenient little glass bottle with a sprinkler thingy on the top that screwed off when you ran out of vinegar and allowed you to fill up the bottle again. People like me have for generations bought the Sarsons bottle because you can put it on your dining table straight from the supermarket trolley. For the best part of six months or more, you can fill it up with cheaper vinegar from big litre containers every time it runs. Eventually it starts to look a bit tacky, so you go to the shop and you buy another one.

All was well, but Sarsons have clearly got fed up with people using these vinegar bottles to contain other manufacturer’s vinegar and sprinkle it out through their sprinkler thingy.

Suddenly, horror of horrors, some bright young thing at Sarsons, probably someone with a marketing degree and no idea how markets actually operate, decides to change the top, so it’s no longer screwed on, but secured into place by some diabolical ‘shrink on’ process that makes it totally impossible to remove ( I know it to be impossible, because – believe me – I tried so hard I nearly put a screwdriver through my hand).

What, I wonder, is the mind set of this commercial genius?

Is it that we will now buy many many more of their expensive bottles with the sprinkler thingy on the top even though their main selling point (i.e. that they used to be refillable) has been removed? Perhaps we are so stupid that we won’t notice that the product no longer has the added value it used to? Perhaps we care so little for the environment that we will be happy to throw more and more glass bottles into the trash simply because Sarsons have seen fit to put some strange security device on the top of their bottles to stop us putting condiments of our choice into bottles that we have paid for and legally own.

No doubt said commercial genius thinks he/she is going to sell more vinegar? Wrong! He/she will sell no vinegar at all. I’ve finally figured out that if I go to Sainsbury’s kitchen department and buy myself a vinegar dispenser that comes without any vinegar at all, I can then fill it with ANY DAMN VINEGAR I LIKE! I don’t even have to look at the gentle advertising created by the Sarsons brand staring back at me over the dinner table every time we have fish and chips.

And the moral of the story? Well, there are two:

1) You can’t make more money by selling something that has less value at the same price, even if you can’t tell it has less value until you try to unscrew it and look inside.
2) Don’t mess with my vinegar.