Bigger Is Better

We are fascinated with big. If a little is good, then more is so much better. The legacy of the past couple of decades are product packages toting slogans like "Super", "Jumbo", "Extra", "Mega", and "More". Big sells everything from hairspray to hamburgers. We behave like greedy eyed kids let loose in a candy store with a weeks' worth of allowance. The marketing and merchandizing folks are only too eager to cash in on our less than admirable lack of restraint. Caught up in the hype, we keep demanding more and more of products and becoming increasingly dissatisfied with simplicity. And while we can all spot the excess just shy of the saturation point ( like Goldie Hawn in "The First Wives Club", who got just one collagen lip injection too many), many of us are swept along blindly right up to that point. I can pinpoint the exact moment when I hit the end of the rail and woke up. The cookie package read: "Just enough dough to hold the chocolate chips together". My first response was: "Yes! I've gotta have some of those". At this point, I'd like to caution, that if you are more interested in what brand I was looking at, and wondering where you can get some, then get back on that train, you've got more rail to ride. They really went too far. I stopped to ponder this tribute to unbridled greed and excess. "Just enough dough to hold the....". I remember my first chocolate chip cookie. My mom made it and it had a modest amount of chips in it. We ate a few and we were content. Sometime during the eighties, the chocolate chip cookie stepped onto the evolutionry fast track. Slogans on the cookie bags read: "More chocolate chips than most other brands", "20% More", "30% More", "40% More", and so on. The war of the chips was on, and by the time the bags were reading "60% More", there was no room left to climb while retaining a measure of dignity. So what were the cookie contenders to do? Abandon all us chocolate frenzied coookie eaters and go home. Well, those New Product Innovation Division guys put their heads together and the chocolate chip underwent a massive transformation. The chocolate chunk was born, and cookie crunchers everywhere raced to try them out. So ended the evolution the chocolate chip cookie just a hair shy of the saturation point. "Just enough dough to hold the chips together" was sharing shelf space with "Jumbo chololate chunks". Ironically the cookie moguls had inched themselves right out of the market, and turned to whole bag over to the chocolate chip guys. After all, the only space left to climb up to, would involve trying to flog bags of chocolate chips with their own spoon inside to the cookie consumer. This was text book example of "product cannibalization". The bigger the chips got, the smaller the cookie got, until it was finally swallowed up by a massive host of chips and chunks. Is bigger better? Most of time, I think bigger isn't any better, it's just more.

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