Can’t buy me love

My good friend, Suzanne, recently sent me an “article” about someone who had ordered his lunch online—from a very busy, fast food joint. Much to the chagrin of the folks waiting in line at the restaurant, this customer showed up at the appointed time, bypassed the queue, picked up his food and sashayed out. There’s more to the story, a sort of punchline ending but what is relevant is the customer who orders lunch online usually pays a premium on the order for the privilege of going to the head of the line. What Suzanne couldn’t have known is I have just finished reading a book about “what isn’t for sale”. As it turns out, just about everything is for sale. In the case of this hungry fellow, he found you can actually buy your way to the front of a line to pick up lunch. Not surprisingly you can do the same for Broadway (on and way off) show tickets, game tickets and admission tickets for just about any kind of event. Money parts the crowds.

Author Michael J. Sandel, a noted Harvard, political philosopher, lays it out pretty clearly in his book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. According to Sandel, everything seems to have market value. It’s all for sale. I’m sure, at this point, many of you are shaking your head and saying to yourselves, “I can think of a few things I’d never buy or sell.” And, for some of us, it’s probably true. We can all think of things in our lives which, plain and simply, are not for sale as marketing devices or for personal gain. But I’ve worn the logoed clothing. I’ll bet you have, too. I own travel mugs that clearly indicate where they were purchased, in particular, one from Starbucks and the other from Tim Hortons. No matter whose brew is in those mugs, anyone looking on would assume I’ve got a “tall, no foam, low-fat, quad shot” or a “doubledouble” going on. Slaking my thirst is for sale. And, most obviously, my body (no snickering, please) has long been a billboard for Adidas, Nike, UnderArmour, Reebok, you name it. My sunglasses have a logo on the arm, my sneakers have a stylized swoosh and my car has a West City Honda licence plate frame.

We can buy the right to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and if we own the “rights” to do that, we can sell those rights to someone else. If we like the bigger game, we can buy the right to shoot an endangered species. In the United States we can buy a prison cell upgrade (think “Conrad Black”) and pay to drive solo in the carpool lane or, as a second-grader in an underachieving school in Dallas, you might get paid two bucks to read a book. I imagine Canadians would love to have the privilege of having their family doctor at their beck and call by paying for his/her private cellphone number. In the United States of America, folks are willing to paying thousands of dollars to have that, and I’m not talking about your next-door-neighbour, the physician, either. This would be a legal agreement. You call and the doctor is “bound” to be at your service. “A finger on the pulse” so to speak. American pharmaceutical companies have seen the potential of marketing directly to patients and for the last decade we, Canadians, have been “treated” to a barrage of American, television advertising inviting us to ask our family doctors for every kind of prescription medication imaginable. Get it up. Get it out. Stop it from getting out. Dry it out. Moisten it. Breathe freely. Sleep deeply. Get your happy on. Calm down and chill out. Stop smoking. Get a band wrapped around it and stop overeating. U.S. broadcasters who have access to Canadian markets can market their products directly to the consumers. We may not have known it ,but our personal satisfaction is for sale with a brand name attached. When we should be more concerned about living a healthy life style, we are all over how we look and how we perform behind closed doors. We don’t hesitate to ask for a prescription by product name. No generics, thank you very much.

Soft drink machines in our schools. Swooshes on our behinds. Videos and placards on the walls of cubicles in restrooms. Video adverts on the walls of doctors’ waiting rooms. Newspapers, overwrapped with Seniors’ Day ads. Fundraisers sponsored by big businesses—ScotiaBank Runs, Becel Rides, Harry Rosen 10Ks and Creemore Vertical Challenge. If we aren’t running, cycling or climbing we can expect to see a sales pitch on a barf bag as we wing and gag our way to paradise. We can sell space on our foreheads or buy space on a park bench. Personally, I’ve been thinking about another tattoo. Anyone? Anyone?

theresa@wellingtontimes.ca