Hot Topic
Local Govt
What is it with this new age of consumer rage? Every time someone finds something inside a product that shouldn’t be there – a maggot, a piece of glass, a golden ticket to Willy Wonka and the Hotchin Factory – there’s a great hue and cry and the offended party ends up on the front page of a news website.
What New Zealand needs right now is a big cup of Harden The Hell Up. Nobody’s perfect and production systems aren’t either. Such things can always happen. Pick out the offending item, check the rest for any other unforeseen surprises, take a sip of Harden Up and eat the rest. Unless it's against your religion, in which case burn the pears at the stake.
Sure, contact the manufacturers and let them know. First you’ll get fun vouchers for free stuff and a pseudo-horrified lady on the other end of the phone. Secondly, they’ll go check how it happened and make sure it didn’t again.
But don’t go to the media screaming and crying about it. Stuff happens. It's hardly fair on the company to push an agenda of media fear when the company will typically quite happily send you replacements and reimbursement and investigate the Offending Maggot and how he got out of his cage.
If the company doesn't want to know or sends you a text with bad words in it, by all means go for gold. But screaming to the media when the company has done its bit is not fair. It's the equivalent of your co-worker Tarquin discovering you made a mistake and then emailing your entire workplace to let them know about it. And then taking out a billboard on K Rd about it with your name and face.
We’ve seen plenty of there's-something-in-my-food media fear in recent times, from the maggots on the muesli bars to the maggot at McDonald’s (man, those maggots get around, hungry little buggers), to today’s Breakfast Shock and Terror to this one, which is the most hilarious thing I’ve seen reported on to date: A satanic pear.
Personally, I check my muesli every morning anyway. I hate those freakin’ yoghurt-covered raisins, so I ruffle them out and in the bin they go.
Now if you find a body part inside your breakfast cereal, then we’ll talk.
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Satanic pears and glassy breakfasts
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