Brand (DIS) Loyalty

     Here's one product of The Great Recession: my brand loyalty is about gone.
     Admittedly, there wasn't a lot of it to begin with, but there were just one or two cereals I would select, a particular brand of bread etc etc.
      Now there's just one big brand: cheapest. With a few restrictions:

  
  I still buy Hellmann's Mayonnaise and Land O'Lakes butter.

      I shuttle back and forth between the outrageously expensive (but delicious) Starbucks coffee and the brand that's on sale, though not quite as delicious.
     I eat more chicken...steaks only every now and then.
     I eat out less.
     All of this is, I believe, fairly typical, no?
     Those dollar dominoes tumble downhill, of course, so the people who own the factories making the rejected brand products have a touch less demand, so they pay workers for fewer hours. And those workers reduce their own brand loyalty...so the vicious cycle continues.
    Henry Ford famously said he wanted his workers to be paid enough that they could afford to buy the cars they were assembling. Amen, Henry, Amen.
     There's a story in this morning's NY Times about China's product counterfeiters adapting to the economy by making less expensive fake goods. There's so much counterfeit product manufacturing in Thailand that they have a museum to it in Bangkok!
    I think I still have two books that I purchased in Taiwan during an R&R trip during my tour in Vietnam. I bought them for pennies from a firm that simply took existing books and reproduced them on cheap paper...without paying anything to the authors or publishers, or course.
     One of them was titled Military Law is to Law as Military Music is to Music...a fake book about a fake legal system.
     If the author is still around, I owe you!

[ADDENDUM: if you want to read a disheatening take on how unnecessary all of this jobless pain is, check out Bob Herbert's column in today's Times.]