Matt Yglesias

The Absurdity of Nescafe Advertising

I contended back in June in response to a question on le bac that it is, in fact, absurd to desire the impossible. John Holbo struck back citing the Nescafe ad reproduced here, which he says “crosses over into Kierkegaardian territory.”

It is absurd to expect to get more from something than you think it is possible to get from anything. Especially if it’s instant coffee.

Still, I don’t think it is absurd to want coffee that would be better than life itself could possibly be. That would be a damn fine cup of coffee.

I think this is exactly backwards. It’s perhaps misguided to have unrealistic expectations about your instant coffee. But it’s not absurd to want an instant coffee that far exceeds the performance of any real-world instant coffee. And, indeed, with its Nespresso line I would say that the Nestle corporation has in fact succeeded in far exceeding my instant coffee expectations, albeit at a price that’s higher than I’m willing to pay. But to want more than “the most” is absurd. It’s on a par with wishing that you could put your coffee in a mug shaped like a square circle.

The larger story here is simply that Nescafe ad copy is often absurd. For example, when I visited Nestle HQ outside Geneva on my junket to Switzerland they had this in their office:

And also this puzzling statement of overall corporate philosophy:

Ever since I saw that last one, “creating magical enjoyment you feel good about” has been my informal mission statement here on the blog.

Topless Coffee Shop

Via Tyler Cowen, Governing’s Ellen Perlman wonders about nudity regulations:

Wait a minute. Topless coffee shops are allowed? Unless otherwise specified?

I ask because a topless coffee shop opened in Vassalboro, Maine, and the only way to prevent copycat businesses — say, a topless auto shop or a topless supermarket — is to pass an ordinance to ban nudity at town businesses. Is this true in all municipalities? Nudity allowed until specified otherwise? Who knew?

This may be a quirk of Maine law, because there is—or at least used to be in the fairly recent past—a topless doghnut shop in Portland.

The lack of regulatory barriers to topless non-alcoholic venues could have important implications for the business model. In DC, for example, the regulation on strip clubs is so strict that you can’t open a new strip club no matter what. That makes possession of an existing license a huge profit center. It also means that if you own one of the existing clubs, you’re in pretty good shape in terms of trying to convince a potential lender or investor that spending money on improving your club’s appeal will pay off in the long run. You’ve got a near-absolute guarantee of monopoly pricing power until the end of time. In other places, the rules aren’t that strict, but the fact still remains that if succeed in squeezing through the regulatory bar you get a some monopoly power and big profits. The economics of DC bars are like this—it’s hard to get one off the ground, but if you manage the trick it’s like you’ve been given a license to print money.

By contrast, if you open a topless coffee shop in Vassalboro that doesn’t face any regulatory issues, you’re presumably going to need to give your coffee on unusually high markup to compensate for your higher labor costs. And there’s nothing stopping me from going one exit up the Maine Turnpike and opening a competing topless coffee shop in Waterville with a somewhat-smaller markup. For all you—or your investors—know, soon there’ll be three or four topless coffee shops north of Augusta and no profits for anyone. Your best hope is to provoke a lot of stories in the national media about this outrageous topless coffee shop in Vassalboro that convinces town and county governments across Maine to issue regulations preventing topless coffee shops. You’ll be grandfathered in, and immune to competition.

Capuccino Conservatism

Joe Romm’s already looked at the carbon footprint of John McCain’s eight home lifestyle, but I think you’ve really got to wonder about the implications of this kind of behavior:

For the second day in a row, Sen. John McCain wanted his morning cup of Joe.

So he gathered his staff, his drivers and his Secret Service agents. He alerted the media to stand by. The bomb sniffing dog was woken up. He put on his sunglasses and baseball cap and headed out.

The six-car caravan (two silver minivans, two tan SUVs and two white 15-passenger vans for the press) left his cabin retreat at just before eight in the morning. Eleven minutes later, the caravan pulled into the parking lot of a Safeway, where a sign proclaimed the presence of a Starbucks.

Cindy McCain, clad in a light pink shirt, khaki shorts and flip flops, paced in front of the Safeway, talking on her phone for a few minutes, her hair pulled into a pony tail. A bit later, she went inside the Safeway and emerged with a coffee cup in hand. A staffer was seen coming out of the Safeway with two cups of coffee and some drycleaning.

Clearly, somebody with a full presidential campaign staff — to say nothing of $273,000 in servant expenditures — could have sent one person in one vehicle to pick up coffee (and dry cleaning) for whoever wanted some rather than deploying a six-vehicle caravan. And the switch from the wasteful means of coffee acquisition to the efficient one would, in practice, have entailed very little welfare loss from McCain. But decades of public policy in the United States aimed at encouraging lavish energy consumption leave people not thinking about these kind of issues. Given sensible carbon pricing and smarter policy that aims at encouraging efficiency — or at least stops encouraging waste — and people (at least those who haven’t married heiresses) would pay a bit more attention to the energy use implications of these kind of choices.