My God! The pepperoni is everywhere here at the
grocery store. Of course, it’s in the cured, prepared meat
aisle with the bacon, the hot dogs, the Polska kielbasa made
from turkey. But now it’s in the beverage aisle because everyone
knows you should have a pound or two of pepperoni while
you toss back that 12 pack. It’s also in the chi-chi delicatessen section
with the Calamata olives, roasted red pepper hummus, feta cheese and
cured Soprassata salami. It’s in the snack aisle with the tortilla, potato
and corn chips, the cheese dip and salsa because it ain’t a snack
tray without pepperoni. It also sits alone at the foot of the dairy
section on the way toward the check out, just in case you have
missed the other four opportunities to pick up a bag, because you
were not paying attention. You were on your cell phone, right?
The times must be tough in the spicy beef and pork salami business if
they have to blanket the store with pepperoni displays.
The times must be tough if they cannot generate adequate sales from
one pepperoni display.
The times must be tough if they are cross merchandising it with every
freaking product that has a thin, spurious red thread connecting it to
pepperoni.
If they could find a way, I wager there would have been a pepperoni display
set up in front of the cold medicine, you might be sick, take your medicine but
remember feed a cold, starve a fever, have some pepperoni, it’ll make you feel
better. God bless the Jews and their chicken soup, but we got pepperoni baby!
Maybe next they will stack it with the baby food. Hey…of course your baby
isn’t ready, but there is nothing stopping you from having a hunk of pepperoni
while you feed the little one mashed peas and strained peaches and someday you
will be able to eat pepperoni together like family.
Maybe they can sell it down the feminine hygiene
aisle. Oh hell, even as a devout merchant of
bad taste, I cannot go there.
The times must be tough, but…given the widening of America, I am thinking it is not
tough times in the pepperoni business. My guess is that the pepperoni business is
booming and booming hard and that five displays of pepperoni merely make it five times
more difficult to say, no I do not need pepperoni this week. Few mortals can continually shrug
off the entreaties of displays placed in the aisle so you nearly trip over them while you
reach for a six pack of beer. You know pepperoni goes good on pizza. You know it is
perfect with cheese on crackers while a sporting event plays on television. You know
pepperoni meets the challenge when the other 15 types of snack food in your cupboard
will not do the trick right before you go to bed. Let’s face it a lot of people are not
saying no to the displays.
And it is funny, because everyone lines to inform you how you should be eating
healthier foods, but then you walk the grocery aisles and are confronted by five pepperoni
displays. If they really wanted you to eat healthier, they would put up five broccoli displays
instead of five pepperoni displays, but that’s one horse no one will wager on.
The truth is that no one wants you to eat healthy or be healthy. They want you to
eat a package of pepperoni each and every day. They want you to go to the doctor so
that they can get their stethoscopes on you, needles in you, blood pressure cuff around your
left arm and sell you pills to control all the problems your pepperoni habit has created. T
hey want you to be large and ill, so they can sell you the cure, a diet book, group meetings,
obesity support therapies, exercise videos, workout clothes, Omar the Tentmaker’s line of oversized fashions,
wide load signs and visits to the psychiatrist to delve the real reasons behind your obesity
because five displays of pepperoni surely have nothing to do with the
making of your sick, fat self.
Not for nothing, but five pepperoni displays in one store is like the brewing companies
telling you to drink responsibly. You know that is a lie. What they are really saying is
drink as much as you want, we will make more. Drink all you like, so long as it doesn’t
cause you to lose your job which might cause you to lose your ability to buy more
beer. Don’t drink and drive because if you kill someone, you will not be buying beer for
awhile and sadly the person you killed will never buy our beer again, not to mention the bad
press as the weeping family blames our beer business for their loss, so be sure you lay
in two thirty packs each and every night so you don’t run out and have to get behind the
wheel.
In fact, nobody wants you to be healthy. The doctors own pepperoni and beer stock. The
beer magnates own pharmaceutical stocks and the pepperoni guy he owns everything beer,
pills, taco chip, cured olive, cheese and sour cream stocks and since I made mention of
it, he has his PR firm working on an angle so they can put a pepperoni display in the feminine hygiene aisle.
In the name of good taste, I would not go there, but they see potential. Six
displays, coming your way fatty. Oh yeah!
THE MIND ATTIC 