Neverending noodle
Let’s go for a moebian little trip through Lipton Chicken Noodle land again...
Trigger: email earlier today (or yesterday, I guess) from one Kevin Hayden, reminding me of my last noodle rant. (Kevin’s email was highly entertaining, btw, but that’s not the point).
For various reasons, too boring to blog, I was prompted by this email dialogue to drill into the Lipton website once again. Unfortunately, the original Lipton site link I’d posted no longer works, so I go hunting and find myself quickly disappearing down a salty, noodle-lined wormhole.
Step 1. I start at the main Lipton site here.
I’m looking for a listing of product ingredients – the sort of simple, useful info you’d think a consumer product manufacturer would post on their site.
Step 2. I see a link for ‘Products’ and duly click.
This ports me out of the Lipton site to a mighty portal of consumer joy titled ‘Homebasics’ – a listing of links to info about all sorts of household product names.
There’s a lot to get twisty about on this page. Lots of well known brand logos on display, but none of them set up as links.
And the little welcome message at the top of the page is enough to send me to the brink of instant apoplectic melt down:
“Homebasics is a new website designed for women like you - busy women with more things to do than time to do it. Homebasics is full of useful tips, seasonal ideas, insightful articles and delicious recipes.”
WHAT?! What the hell is this, the nineteen-frigging-fifties? For the record: as I actually enjoy it, and Sausage emphatically doesn’t - I do almost all the grocery shopping in this house, and most of the cooking. But even if this wasn’t the case, I’d still be startled by this astonishing cluelessness. I need a reality check here from any women reading this – am I overreacting?
Meanwhile – back to the point.
Step 3. One of the brands linked to is, of course, Lipton:
Lipton is the tasty and trusted family favourite. Visit www.lipton.ca for information, recipes and tips for your favourite Lipton Sidekicks and Soups.
Er...OK. I click the link.
You guessed it: GOTO STEP 1
I’ve scoured every obvious corner of this site. There is absolutely no way to find out anything about Lipton soups anywhere on the site.
There is a Lipton.com, btw – but that only includes info about their tea products. This also seems to be a mistake – the title bar actually reads “LiptonT.com”. I checked, and this other domain also exists, but both lipton.com and liptont.com resolve to the same cheesy Flash site.
FWIW, all of these products owe their allegiance to the mighty Unilever empire. As it happens, I really like Unilever – we use a lot of their products: Breyer’s ice cream, Hellmann’s mayo, Bertolli olive oil, Pears for Kids shampoos, Vaseline jelly for various babies’ bums, and Q-Tips (ooooh I love me Q-Tips...). They make pretty good stuff at a reasonable price and have some half decent marketing.
But whoever threw this recursive loop into their website needs their nose squeezed. Hard.
I could go on, but I think I already did, and I for one am bored already. Sorry. I did it again, didn’t I?
Let’s go for a moebian little trip through Lipton Chicken Noodle land again...
Trigger: email earlier today (or yesterday, I guess) from one Kevin Hayden, reminding me of my last noodle rant. (Kevin’s email was highly entertaining, btw, but that’s not the point).
For various reasons, too boring to blog, I was prompted by this email dialogue to drill into the Lipton website once again. Unfortunately, the original Lipton site link I’d posted no longer works, so I go hunting and find myself quickly disappearing down a salty, noodle-lined wormhole.
Step 1. I start at the main Lipton site here.
I’m looking for a listing of product ingredients – the sort of simple, useful info you’d think a consumer product manufacturer would post on their site.
Step 2. I see a link for ‘Products’ and duly click.
This ports me out of the Lipton site to a mighty portal of consumer joy titled ‘Homebasics’ – a listing of links to info about all sorts of household product names.
There’s a lot to get twisty about on this page. Lots of well known brand logos on display, but none of them set up as links.
And the little welcome message at the top of the page is enough to send me to the brink of instant apoplectic melt down:
“Homebasics is a new website designed for women like you - busy women with more things to do than time to do it. Homebasics is full of useful tips, seasonal ideas, insightful articles and delicious recipes.”
WHAT?! What the hell is this, the nineteen-frigging-fifties? For the record: as I actually enjoy it, and Sausage emphatically doesn’t - I do almost all the grocery shopping in this house, and most of the cooking. But even if this wasn’t the case, I’d still be startled by this astonishing cluelessness. I need a reality check here from any women reading this – am I overreacting?
Meanwhile – back to the point.
Step 3. One of the brands linked to is, of course, Lipton:
Lipton is the tasty and trusted family favourite. Visit www.lipton.ca for information, recipes and tips for your favourite Lipton Sidekicks and Soups.
Er...OK. I click the link.
You guessed it: GOTO STEP 1
I’ve scoured every obvious corner of this site. There is absolutely no way to find out anything about Lipton soups anywhere on the site.
There is a Lipton.com, btw – but that only includes info about their tea products. This also seems to be a mistake – the title bar actually reads “LiptonT.com”. I checked, and this other domain also exists, but both lipton.com and liptont.com resolve to the same cheesy Flash site.
FWIW, all of these products owe their allegiance to the mighty Unilever empire. As it happens, I really like Unilever – we use a lot of their products: Breyer’s ice cream, Hellmann’s mayo, Bertolli olive oil, Pears for Kids shampoos, Vaseline jelly for various babies’ bums, and Q-Tips (ooooh I love me Q-Tips...). They make pretty good stuff at a reasonable price and have some half decent marketing.
But whoever threw this recursive loop into their website needs their nose squeezed. Hard.
I could go on, but I think I already did, and I for one am bored already. Sorry. I did it again, didn’t I?
