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Hello, and welcome to the twenty-fifth installment of NotWriting.com, an open
journal on how one writer spends his time when he really should be
writing.I
am currently engaged in a David v. Goliath fight with the Hershey Foods
Corporation over the recent change in packaging of their chocolate bars.
The company has betrayed the American people, and I intend to bring their
betrayal to the attention of as many consumers as possible.
One afternoon
this summer, while at the grocery store checkout, Alexas and I made a
disappointing discovery. The Hershey bars were no longer packaged in their
familiar and comforting way: in foil-covered paper and a dark brown paper
sleeve with "HERSHEY'S®"
emblazoned proudly across the front. The company, in its infinite wisdom,
had switched to plastic wrappers. Since then, Alexas and I have boycotted
the products in question—the
Hershey's®
Milk Chocolate and the Hershey's®
Milk Chocolate with Almonds candy bars.
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Caught up with
other things, I let the issue simmer until Halloween week. I was grocery
shopping when I turned down the candy aisle and noticed that all of the
Hershey's®
chocolate bars with the old wrapping were gone and had been replaced with
that soulless shrink-wrap.
As often happens
to me when I'm alone and spot an injustice, I looked around for someone
with whom I could share my misery. The only candidate was a Wise Potato
Chips deliveryman, kneeling on the floor about twenty feet away, furiously
shoving bags of BBQ onto the shelves.
I picked up a
12-pack of the milk chocolate bars. What was this country coming to? Was
nothing sacred? The old wrapping had been good enough for the chocolate
carried by men on D-Day. A lot of men died on June 6, 1944 fighting for
the American way of life, and part of the American Way they were fighting
for was Hershey's®
chocolate and every American's right to enjoy the confectionery treat in a
Nazi-free state. Also, whether they realized it or not, they were fighting
for subsidiary rights related to the chocolate bars and their packaging:
1) the right of every American to buy and consume a small piece of
tradition, 2) the right to have certain items in their lives that didn't
change, and 3) the right to rewrap a chocolate bar if one couldn't finish
it.
"That's it," I
said. "I'm doing something about this."
Mr. Potato Chip
looked at me. I tossed the package of chocolate bars back on the shelf,
hoping I'd pulverized them, and pushed my cart away.
On the way home,
I reminisced about being a boy and witnessing my grandfather's addiction
to Hershey's®
with Almonds. Every day, my grandmother went to the linen closet where she
kept a 12-pack of the chocolate bars hidden between the sheets. Nan and Ab
(my grandfather) played a game: As long as Nan coughed up his daily candy
bar, Ab pretended not to know where she hid them. Once he had the Hershey
bar in his hands, Ab lovingly slid the foil-wrapped treat out of its paper
sheath, opened the shiny wrapper, and broke off a piece. There is no other
sound in the world like the quiet snap of a Hershey bar being cleaved for
consumption; and hearing that sound, along with the gentle crinkling of
the old Hershey's®
wrapper, never failed to remind me of him and of how much I loved him. By
changing their packaging, Hershey's®
has now taken this private pleasure away from me.
Once home and
the groceries were put away, I opened up my notebook to the number for
Hershey's®
customer comments hotline. I had written it down because I didn't want to
support the new packaging by purchasing one of the chocolate bars. The
back of the bar has the following message, which I repeat here in case
you'd like to call and give Hershey's®
a piece of your mind—something
NotWriting.com strongly supports:
QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS ABOUT THIS PRODUCT,
CALL TOLL-FREE WEEKDAYS 9-4 EST 1-800-468-1714.
Before picking up the phone, I jotted down the main points of my
argument-a tactic I often use to prevent myself from freezing up on the
telephone and stammering like Woody Allen. Two of the arguments against
the new packaging were Alexas's: 1) that the chocolate melts easily in the
plastic wrapping and 2) that if you're unable to finish the whole bar, you
can't rewrap it anymore. Both are excellent points.
My arguments
were more of a spiritual and patriotic nature, the main one being that for
years Hershey's®
has marketed its chocolate bar as an immutable piece of Americana. Back in
the winter of 1999-2000, when the Hershey's®
Milk Chocolate bar turned 100, the company's whole campaign centered
around the idea that, after all those years, the chocolate hadn't changed.
Now, with the plastic wrap, it's as if Hershey's®
never believed any of that. Could it be that they simply capitalized on
the 100th Anniversary of their flagship product and that once the
celebration came and went, and it was no longer cost-effective to use the
old packaging, they just decided to go cheap so they could save an extra
nickel on the wrapper? I was going to find out. |
I don't know about you,
but I sleep much better at night knowing that the chocolate I just ate
was pressed up against some of ExxonMobil Chemical's good-old
"Bicor® 75 CSR-2/ ink / adhesive / Metallyte™." Yummy.
PARANOIA: This "recorder suction-cup
mount," available at your local Radio
Shack for $5.49, is very handy when
calling companies to complain. |
I dialed the
"QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS" hotline and went through a voicemail obstacle
course before speaking with a customer service representative. She
identified herself as Diane, and I have to say she was much more
sympathetic to my cause than I imagined a Hershey's®
employee would be. I recorded the call using a digital recorder and a
Radio Shack
suction-cup microphone, and later transcribed the conversation into my
computer using IBM ViaVoice software. To read the transcript of that call,
click
here.
I considered the
phone call a success because I now knew Hershey's®
two main selling points for the new packaging: 1) it's more tamper-proof
and 2) it keeps the chocolate fresh longer. However, before I wrote my
letter of complaint to Hershey's® Public Relations, I needed to
do some research.
After discussing
the issue with my wife, she found several interesting pieces on Hershey's®
new packaging for me. The most revealing is from Packaging Digest
(one of those abstruse and scary trade magazines). In their
July 2003 online issue they ran, "Hershey Unwraps New
Packaging," a short article that reveals a lot more about the new
packaging process than any of us want to know. It starts out friendly
enough:
For the first
time in 67 years, Hershey Foods Corp. has updated the packaging for
its Hershey's®
Milk Chocolate and Hershey's®
Milk Chocolate with Almonds candy bars. The new wrapper design
incorporates a contemporary look, along with consumer-preferred
graphics and fin-seal packaging. The new look is part of an overall
marketing effort designed to revitalize Hershey's iconic brands and
is an important component in reconnecting with today's younger
consumers.
Not a problem. I
have no idea what "fin-seal packaging" means, but I'm willing to live with
it. However, when I get to a passage that goes into detail about the
manufacturing process for the new packaging, I get genuinely worried:
The new
packaging material is a two-ply lamination of ExxonMobil Chemical's
Bicor®
75 CSR-2/ink/adhesive/Metallyte(tm) 50 TSPM/cold seal converted by
Curwood. The outside web of Bicor 75 CSR-2 was specifically designed
to provide excellent cold-seal release, while the Metallyte 50 TSPM
offers a brilliant metal appearance and exceptional cold-seal
adhesion to the nonmetallized surface.
I don't know
about you, but I sleep much better at night knowing that the chocolate I
just ate was pressed up against some of ExxonMobil Chemical's good-old "Bicor®
75 CSR-2 / ink / adhesive / Metallyte™."
Yummy.
BETRAYAL: These wrappers are the
"plasticized"
replacements for the old ones, which had some character.
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What was wrong with paper? That's what I want to know.
Unlike plastic, which is derived from petrochemicals, paper is a
renewable resource. So once again, in another small, insidious
way, we're dependent on oil.
Paper is
almost entirely American made—the
trees are here, the mills are here, the workers are here—so
its production keeps Americans employed. Some workers in the paper
industry will certainly be hurt by the packaging change. Also,
according to Alexas, there are companies out there that create
custom chocolate bar sleeves for special occasions. Now that
Hershey's®
has dropped the
time-tested outer sleeve, what will become of the people who
produce them?
Another
observation about the change in packaging: they should include a
pair of scissors with the new Hershey bars; the plastic wrap is
that impossible to open. For the first two inches or so, a nice
slit develops, but if you accidentally let the plastic tear off at
the corner, you better have a bowie knife handy because you can't
tear it with your fingers, and your teeth will come out of your
head before you get it open that way.
On the
other hand, a paper wrapper is easy to open. Think Christmas Day.
In fact, when you were opening a Hershey bar with the traditional
packaging, it was like unwrapping a little present. And when you
were finished, you could recycle the paper or burn it in your
fireplace.
(As a
side note, allow me to mention that the Hershey's®
paper-foil wrapper gives off a blue flame when tossed into a
campfire. Future generations of Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and
summer camp people will no longer have the thrill of this
phenomenon when making S'mores.)
About
five years ago, when Nabisco stopped making its Crown Pilot
crackers (a staple for chowder in all real New England
households), my aunt Valerie in Rockland, Maine spearheaded the
campaign to bring them back. And guess what? She won. Mighty
Nabisco caved to a smart and sassy Maine woman, and folks got
their crackers back.
I'm
going to follow my Aunt Val's example. I'm not sitting down on
this Hershey's®
wrapper issue. I don't know yet what my response will be, but you
better believe I'll be doing something.
We don't
choose our causes. Most of the time, we
don't even realize what's important to us until the thing is gone.
What bothers me the most is the tradition being arbitrarily snatched
away. That, and the manipulation. Suddenly almighty Hershey's®
decides to switch to plastic, and we, the consumers, are expected
to be good little sheep and continue to buy their product without
a word. Well, not me.
An
American institution has betrayed us, an American institution that
for generations has capitalized on its status as an American icon.
They used their association with tradition, fidelity, and
integrity to sell us their chocolate. Now it seems they want to
save a few cents by trading in substance for appearance, Mozart
for Milli Vanilli, and they're hoping no one will notice. Well,
too late, Hershey's®—some
of us already did.
To be
continued...
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Above: The author, still not writing. He's
out in Hershey, Pennsylvania, organizing
a mass demonstration.
Meanwhile, his
faithful cat guards the wads of paper.
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©2003 Chris Orcutt and notwriting.com. All rights
reserved. |
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