Monopoly

Are you supposed to enjoy playing Monopoly? I suppose Monopoly Smackdown Challenge might be fun and, let's face it, that's how the game usually ends up anyway - somebody always ends up in a strop.

I once had a major hissy fit when I got trounced at Scrabble by the blogger formerly known as Trillion. Or the former blogger "Trillion". Whatever. She was supposed to be being nice to me but did the queyntish thing of, well, this:

"How many points for queynte?"

Yep, the addition of "cove" to "omit" gave her a triple word score on "cove" plus the additional points from "vomit" quite literally made me sick. With an unassailable lead, I admitted defeat by throwing the board off the table and stropping away, muttering "I can't even fucking play fucking scrabble".


Everyone knows that cheese and onion is GREEN!
But back to Monopoly, or monopolies. This consumer champion wants fairness in the market place. It should be up to us, the consumers, to decide what brands we want to buy and things shouldn't be forced on us by the large retailers. My main argument is the availability of Coca Cola brands over Pepsi brands, there only ever being chilled still water and never chilled fizzy water.

This week, salty snack manufacturer Golden Wonder called in the administrators as it admitted financial difficulties. There was a time when Golden Wonder brand crisps dominated the market. The "golden age" of snacking was the late 1970s and early 1980s when, not only did they have a healthy share of the crisp market, but they also had the genius idea of coming up with the FUCKIN' DELISH Pot Noodle. Things couldn't have been better.

In the late 1980s, something odd happened: a new brand of crisps emerged in the North West. These were weird, their packet colours didn't conform to the traditional norms: cheese and onion (always green/yellow) were blue, salt and vinegar (always pale blue) were green. What the fuck was all this about?



The brand that suddenly appeared was "Walkers". We'd never had them before, but when I moved about to universities and things, I noticed that Walkers were becoming more and more prevalent. It got to the point in the mid 1990s whereby you'd notice similar product placement in supermarkets: Walkers would take prime spot in Tesco, weird colours and all. Why? What was going on?

Walkers crisps are OK, but they're not as nice as Golden Wonder. I guess I still can't come to terms with having salt and vinegar crisps in a green packet. Green??? Everybody knows that green is cheese and onion.

INCORRECT!

I find it a shame, but also very annoying, that companies that have done nothing wrong (except selling Pot Noodle to Proctor and Gamble or some other weird multinational conglomerate) have essentially been driven into extinction because of aggressive marketing within our supermarkets. It shouldn't be up to the supermarkets to decide what brands we buy. In fact, I'd expect the supermarkets to be entirely independent and give all brands an equal footing once they'd decided to stock a product.

Gets right on my tits so it does. Queynting fuckers.

Cove and vomit indeed.