I have long found it a curious fact of life that store brand packages are so unattractive. Sometimes it has to do with cheaper packaging - plastic bottles instead of glass or a plastic jar instead of a little tin. But even aside from that, they tend to be unattractive; the pictures on the packaging just aren't pretty. It baffled me for a long time that they don't bother to put a pretty picture on the package. I'm sure that somewhere working for them, they have somebody who was in his high school photography club and can take a picture of some cookies that makes them look really appetizing. Yet they don't. And I think that I've now realized the reason; they want the packaging to scream "store brand!" at the customer. Because a lot of people (myself included) don't care about buying the name brand for a lot of things. So when we go looking for butter or peanuts or dishsoap, we actually look for that rather pathetic looking box or can or bottle that means it's cheaper than the name brand. And that's how we find it.
What really baffles me, though, is unattractive books. Unattractive books at Borders or Barnes and Noble cost just as much as the beautiful ones do. I grant you that it can be really difficult to design a really beautiful book, but it's really not hard to identify one. There's somebody whose job it is to OK books before they get printed. So how do some books get printed? You know the ones I mean - the ones you look at and think, "Oh, man. The people who published this book must have just hated it 'cause there is no excuse for a book this ugly. I could design a better cover than that." Okay, you're right; you don't spend that much thought on them. What you actually think is, "Nope." An ugly cover does nothing but hurts that book's sales. So why do ugly books exist?
PS: The title line is from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
PPS: As a general rule, I firmly dislike T.S. Eliot. Do not think my quoting him means I like (or understand) his poetry. Neither does it mean I am impeccably cultured, merely that I have a friend who is. (And for anyone interested, I'm taking bets on how long it takes her to respond to that comment...)
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I am *not* impeccably cultured. I resent that just as much as your previous assumption that I know everything.
I quote more often from badly made movies (including more Disney than anyone should suffer in a lifetime) than from great literature. That is *not* the mark of impeccable culture.
"So how should I presume?"
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