Ssmmookkiinn''

There are times when I feel I'm observing insanity. Tonight I watched a touching commercial about quitting smoking and that there are no safe cigarettes. The sponsor of the ad is revealed to be Phillip Morris, the maker of tobacco products. The message of this ad is quite simple: Please let us help you stop using our product. It will hurt you!

Huh?

I realize that this is punishment of cigarette manufacturers for putting addictive qualities in their cigarettes to hook the young into becoming loyal customers. Their penalty has been to convince people not to use their product.

At the same time we are pummeled on a daily basis from advertisers obsessed with convincing us that we need far more than we do. When we go to the store we purchase much more than we need. One could say that in this country we are addicted to accumulating. We have the majority of the world's wealth and we could live with far less that we do, yet advertisers have convinced us that we need more, more, more!

So the question I have is this: what if other companies were made to do what the cigarette have to do? After all our lust to consume more looks pretty addictive in this country. (If you don't believe me, Christmas is coming!)

"Hi, welcome to Penney’s. I would like to introduce you to Martha, your personal shopping assistant. She is a free service that we provide you to help you make responsible merchandise choices. She will accompany you to assist you in deciding whether the purchases you are thinking about, make sense, or if you are driven by the advertisement soaked belief that you need any given item."

Not only have we provided personal shopping assistants, but also all impulse items will be pulled from around the registers, eliminating the last minute purchase of items your children are screaming that they can't live without ( Consumers in training). As a courtesy we will have trained shopping counselors in each department to help you decided whether what you purchasing is driven by impulse or by need.

Something tells me that if this is what businesses would have to deal with in this country, it may be cheaper to do business in another country. Then all the money we can't spend because we don't have the stores around anymore could be sent to other countries so they could afford this newfound obsession of theirs.