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Olive oil and name inflation
I've always found it strange that the three main kinds of olive oil - pure, virgin, and extra virgin - have such similar names. I mean, what's the difference between "virgin" and "extra virgin" in any other context? In olive oil, of course, it makes a big difference. (It comes down to the production process.)
Olive oil suffers from name inflation. The producers who came up with the grades apparently didn't want to call the varieties "OK," "good," and "great," so they gave them all very positive names. But that didn't make the "pure" variety any better.
The lesson here is that simply naming something more positively doesn't actually make it better. You might fool some of the people some of the time (at the very beginning), but...
The cliche comes to mind that "there's no shortcut to quality." Good experience doesn't come about from cheap methods.
Some other examples I thought of:
• Moody's rates creditworthiness with grades that start with AAA, AA, and A. Getting anything below an A can be a big blow.
• Eggs: what's the difference between large and jumbo? Don't those words mean basically the same thing?
• Does anyone believe in the word "deluxe" any more?
Update: just remembered another one...
• Pinball scores: "back in my day," in the arcades of the 1980s, a typical game of pinball might rack up a score in the tens of thousands. Sometime in the 90s I noticed a shift. Apparently trying to make the games appear more exciting, pinball designers started making the games rack up points in the millions. The games were no more exciting, on the whole, and so the score inflation became more noise in the experience - no improvement at all.
Can you think of others?
The obvious one to me is in food contexts, where nothing seems to be "small" anymore. You might have "medium", "large", and "extra-large". Or you might have "large", "enormous", and "gigantic". Or you might have whatever cryptic names Starbucks comes up with.
Although many have pointed this out in the past, the drink sizes at Starbucks have always made me giggle. Want a small? Order a "Tall"! And it goes up from there to Grande(!!) and Venti(!!!!).
I've been getting Starbucks for years and I still have to refer to the menuboard to remember what size I want during any particular visit.
- Steve
When I first started buying cars, the convention among certain manufacturers was to distinguish models' trim levels with a suffix to the name, and some still do such as Land Rover Discovery LE. They started out with things like L, LE, LX, HL... Nobody ever knew what any of these things meant (except for GT), but the industry insider joke was that LE, allegedly a "premium" trim level, actually stood for "Low End"
Free gift.
Free bonus gift.
The sizes of olives themselves: Super Collossal Mammoth
http://www.practicallyedible.com/edible.nsf/encyclopaedia!openframeset&frame=Right&Src=/edible.nsf/pages/olivesizes!opendocument
And Steven Wright's sweater size: Extra Medium
Great stuff. The vocabulary of olive sizes was the subject of a wonderful Marshall Efron skit on The Great American Dream Machine in the early 1970s -- I still remember it from my alienated adolescence. : )
Well here in Norway, you go into the grocery store and get to choose between "Tomatoes" and "Tomatoes with taste".
(If you ask me, they all taste the same. Nothing.)
And the TV promos:
"An all-new episode of . . . "
To distinguish from those episodes that are only partly new.
And then there's beef.
Quick quiz for those of us in the States: Which is better, select, choice, or prime?
The USDA's grading and naming of cuts of beef is the kind of system that all players in an industry can embrace, which means that the names themselves have little informational value. All are positive, and there's no implied ranking or preference.
Though not strictly name inflation, the negative result for consumers is the same.
I refuse to accept chains enforcing their bizarre nomenclature on me so my infrequent visits to Starbucks go something like this;
‘Can I have your medium sized latte?’
‘Do you mean Grande?’
‘Is that medium?’
‘Well it’s Grande…’
‘Is that large?’
‘No it’s not, it’s….Grande’
Points the middle sized one ‘the medium one there please…’
And so on…
There's a whole book to be written (or perhaps a helpful pamphlet) for the shopper's guide to food grading in the US (and probably other countries as well).
The varying levels of 'organic' (95-100%+ of some measure allows them to use the word 'organic'...), aforementioned beef and eggs, juice (aargh!), olive oils, etc.
Blood pressure rising... back to work.
It's rather odd: - these examples (funny all, though that was probably not the intention of whoever thought them up) are created in the realm and way-of-thinking of major capitalism - however, communism mastered this too, for the exact opposite reason (that none was better).
For example, a chinese passenger ship may have three classes but there's no first class, and the lowest one would always be something like "people's class"...
Go figure...
At Starbucks...I don't actually want something called a "Grande". It just sounds way too big. I always resist with a momentary fear that I'll be handed a gigantic big-gulp-sized coffee -- causing jitters and too many trips to the bathroom. A "medium" seems just fine.
I remember hearing somewhere that Starbucks took 'Tall' and 'Grande' from traditional barista-speak, but when they wanted a name for their 20oz coffee, they had already max-ed out the scale, so they went with 'Vente'. 'Vente' is Italian 'twenty.' So I suppose that the authenticity of Starbuck ends with their medium size.
I too refuse to order a 'grande' or a 'tall'. There's nothing wring with 'small'. Small electronics are all the rage. Small drinks can also perfectly fill a thirsty-but-not-dehydrated niche.
I also refuse to order a 'Mac'-anything.
It's a "chicken burger" or an "egg muffin" not a MacMuffin.
I agree with the opinions about name inflation and meaningless (i.e. uninformative) 'descriptive' words.
However, I'd like to point out that 'large' and 'jumbo' do actually mean something when it comes to egg size. A dozen large eggs weigh 24 oz., a dozen jumbo, 30. In baking, it makes a difference which size egg is used.
The best summary I have seen comes from Perals Before Swine - here is the only link I could find, the summary is the second one on the page:
http://community.livejournal.com/pearlswine/tag/coffee
Cheers!
My local pizza delivery place has actually renamed its pizzas to start with "small", whereas they previously started with "medium". No idea why - perhaps because parents wouldn't get a medium for younger kids? - but I thoroughly approve and told them so.