Archive: Opinions

I am brand loyal.  My wife likes to try new things.  I think that if something works really well for me there is no reason to change.  She thinks I will never discover I like something better if I don't try things.  Sometimes she is right about this.  More often, not (she is right about a lot of other things that I am wrong about).

So I was skeptical when a different brand of facial tissue showed up in our bathroom.  I like the leading brand.  This brand looked like that horrible hotel kind of tissue that crackles when it crinkles because it is so not soft.  Like sneezing into wax paper.  This was a case where I was right.  But this morning I turned the box over and that's when I got angry.

On the bottom of the box it says, 'Extra Soft, Extra Strong, Extra Absorbent.'  My take was that it was almost as bad as wiping your nose with notebook paper, so I decided to try an experiment.  For softness there was no contest.  The leading brand keeps getting softer whenever they do something to it.  This is a company that actually improves its product when it says it is improving it.  A couple of swipes of the new tissue is like using a power sander to give yourself a nose job.

I took a sheet of the leading brand that I like, and a sheet of this interloper tissue.  I applied equal pressure to each.  I wasn't surprised when the new tissue tore apart.  I actually was surprised that the leading brand didn't.  I had thought it was strong -- well using the word strong to refer to tissue does seem ironic -- but this really was strong.  Compared to the 'Extra Strong' brand it was positively Herculean.

So that left absorbent.  I dripped two equal-sized puddles of water onto the bathroom counter, wadded up each sheet of tissue, and tossed them each onto its own puddle.  Then I swiped each tissue once lightly over its puddle.  The results were just like those commercials for things like the Sham-Wow.  The water was entirely gone under the name brand that I like.  There were large smears of water where the interloper had been.

So here is a box of tissue that tells me it is extra soft, strong, and absorbent.  That may be true, but relative to what?  That's what I got angry about.  If the inference is that it has more of those qualities than the leading brand, then it is a bold-faced lie.  But that's not what it says.  It just says 'extra,' but doesn't give you a clue about what the measure is.  The message is positively Clintonian.  When is 'extra' extra?

Is it more soft than leaves from a tree, or than sandpaper?  Is it softer than a crow bar?  I know it's not stronger than a crow bar.  But it is a lot more absorbent than a crow bar.  So on the crow bar standard, two out of three of its claims are true.  Measure it against a cotton ball and it probably will turn out to be zero out of three.  Heck, my sleeve beats it on all three claims!  So does the leading brand, perhaps a more reasonable thing to measure it against.

Words matter.

On a side note, I noticed on the two tissue boxes that the leading tissue brand is made in Canada, and the inferior one in the United States.  Is that the state of the world now, where we outsource our tissue?  Have our noses become so delicate that we can't rough up our hands making good things any more?  Late night talk show hosts now make jokes about China owning the U.S.  I don't find them funny -- those jokes worry me.  And now tissue!

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