It’s hard to decide what’s worse: when companies openly treat people like idiots, or when they do it by stealth.
Either way, they tend to get away with it indefinitely. The head-bangingly obvious conclusion just reached by an advisory panel to the US Food and Drug Administration is that the so-called decongestant in many over-the-counter cold medications does not decongest.
These eminent analysts might have saved years of costly research by consulting a panel of snotty, bung-nosed cold sufferers, who would have said: “Waste of bunny. By doze is still blocked after I take theb. As you cad see, I’b a bouth-breather.”
Every nose owner knows that since New Zealand’s – and many other countries’ – health wallahs had pseudoephedrine decongestants restricted to prescription-only (because oiks kept squandering them in meth labs) their over-the-counter replacement, containing phenylephrine, has given no relief to blocked hooters.
There may be a placebo effect, but given the rather obvious distinction between a nose that can breathe and a nose that cannot, it must be very rare indeed.
It’s galling to be told the truth so belatedly – and at great expense to the American taxpayer.
Given that manufacturers of “special” painkillers for neck, back, period and headache pain have already been caught putting exactly the same ingredients in each, no one will be surprised, but it does, it has to be said, get up one’s nose.
Then there’s Britain, where transport authorities continue to infantilise customers – not just, as might be forgivable, about train services, but about their diet. Transport for London (TfL) first banned an ad featuring a wedding cake from its stations and has now outlawed posters promoting artisan cheeses.
Rest assured, TfL does also patronise travellers about travel, including urging them to carry bottled water because, despite several years’ vaulting temperatures, it hasn’t seen fit to air-condition or even ventilate most trains.
So, while seemingly unbothered that bottled water won’t save anyone from fainting or heat stroke on the train, TfL is terrified to think passengers might binge on a three-tier, rose-strewn cake at £100-plus, or a £10 hunk of Stilton once off the train. That is, once these passengers have passed the slew of cheap burgers, chips, doughnuts in sundry fast-food joints in and around the average train station for which TfL collects rent.
The cake wasn’t even being advertised, but featured in posters for a comedy play about a wedding. The fear that commuters would be ravenously overcome by this incidental glimpse of cake is on a par with the Victorian era’s swathing of furniture legs to deter gentlemen’s urges.
Arguably, wedding cake is the least harmful of sweets, because it’s rationed out in dainty portions, which many people discreetly bin because they dislike both the dense fruit cake it’s usually made of and its outer plaster cast of sickly icing, which is designed to look luminously Instagrammable rather than be edible.
Equally, decades of research has yet to locate artisan cheeses as a cause of the obesity epidemic.
French supermarket chain Carrefour has been an unlikely consumer defender, naming and shaming manufacturers who’ve downsized products to get effective price hikes of up to 40% – the new scourge of shrinkflation.
Again, it’s wrongly assumed shoppers are morons who won’t notice, and Carrefour was sick of getting the blame.
Conversely, British supermarkets Tesco and Waitrose have gulled “club-card” shoppers that they’ve saved a bundle on a product’s price – using a “normal” price that, on analysis, was only normal for a few days.
But with Andrex having cut the width and length of each roll of toilet paper to the tune of 10 fewer … um … sittings, that really is the bitter end.
