When Steve Sailer was in the marketing research business, his wife suggested that he start own product testing firm, because it would have the competitive advantage of needing just one single tester:
P&G and Frito-Lay could hire me to take home a case of their planned product. If I really liked their innovation, then they would immediately bury all existing samples in a landfill, burn the recipes, and fire the executives responsible.
It turns out he’s just one of many such harbingers of failure:
What do Crystal Pepsi, Watermelon Oreos, Frito-Lay Lemonade, Coors Rocky Mountain Sparkling Water, Colgate Kitchen Entrees and Cheetos Lip Balm all have in common?
The obvious answer is they are all failed products. What is less obvious is that they may also share a fan base — a quirky subgroup of consumers who are systemically drawn to flops and whose reliably contrarian tastes can be used to forecast bad bets in retail sales, real estate and even politics. These people are known as “harbingers of failure.”
The study of harbingers emerged from a 2015 analysis of purchasing patterns at a national convenience store chain. (In exchange for the data, the researchers agreed not to reveal the identity of the chain.) Drawing on six years’ worth of data from the chain’s loyalty card program, a team of marketing professors led by Eric Anderson of Northwestern University classified customers according to their affinity for buying new products that were later pulled from the shelves because of weak demand. Of the roughly 130,000 customers whose purchases were logged, a sizable fraction (about 25 percent) consistently took home products that bombed.
I used to be exactly that, but for TV shows. As soon as I got into a show, it’d get canceled within the week.
Freaks and Geeks? Firefly? What else?
I have heard that Las Vegas will put a ‘Cooler’ at a hot table. This is a person that they know will reliably always lose.
For all the humor of it, I think this is a real phenomena–At least, based on what I’ve observed over the years. Nice to know I’m not the only person who has noted this.
Just as there are “influencers”, the logic would dictate that there are “contra-influencers”. Now, my question is, how much impact do these people actually have? Would the herd follow the influencer if they didn’t already kinda-sorta want to go that direction already? Would the contra-influencer drive people away from what their natural inclinations were, or are all these sorts merely bellwethers, harbingers of fad and fashion?
I don’t have enough data to answer, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that there’s a solid chance most of this is “real”. Either that, or there’s something else going on, someone writing the code-script for our universe, there in the background.
Thing that I wonder about is just what all this means–Is there a superscript function to reality that enables this sort of thing, or is it just an artifact of statistics–Someone will always lead the trends, and someone will always lead the anti-trend?
Difficult to say, with our present state of knowledge–Which ain’t all that great, despite our arrogant assumption that it is. I’ll wager you long odds that there are significant things there, to be teased out of the marketing data and research along these lines. What the hell they might be? No idea at all…
There’s an xkcd for this.
Everything I like is something obscure that you’ve probably never heard of.
Not sure if I’m a contra-influencer or just a hipster.
Isegoria, Firefly was one, definitely. But off the top of my head, Dollhouse, Sarah Connor Chronicles, Kings (a version of the story of King Saul, set in a modern era, with Ian McShane), Arrested Development, Heroes, Andy Richter Controls the Universe (I was a technical writer at the time), Pushing Daisies, Deadwood, Rome, Carnivale.
Most of those shows are from a while ago, because it got to the point where I wouldn’t start watching shows until years after they started so I wouldn’t everyone else’s experience. But it still happens, a recent example is Counterpart with JK Simmons.
Deadwood and Heroes were the only ones on that list that I watched from the start. The others, I’d start watching and within a couple weeks at the outside, cancelled.
If anyone has a show that they hate or thinks shouldn’t be on the air, let me know. I’ll start watching and it’ll go away if I like it.
There are also what I’d term “iconoclast” buyers, who do crazy things like buy Olympus digital SLRs with their unique 4/3 aspect ratio, and who will defend to the death their choices. Citroen buyers? Same-same. Similar to the folks who insist on buying Land Rover Defenders over things that work, like Toyota trucks and SUVs.
You run into these folks along the edges of things, enthusiasts for solutions and products that the mainstream has left on the shelf. They chose these things because…? No idea, really–A lot of the time, it would be far more sensible to go with the pack, and be able to take advantage of the economies of scale that come along with following the “standard path”. However, I think the iconoclast population derives at least as much satisfaction from taking the path not followed as they do any theoretical technical benefits of doing what they do.
They’re a weird breed–I remember running into a guy who was hunting with a Zastava-made Mauser rifle he’d had to have brought in through Canada, in 6.5 Swedish, topped with what was then an exotic Austrian-brand rifle scope from Kahles. It was bizarre in the extreme to meet that guy in the mountains of Oregon’s coastal range, but just a couple of questions about his unique choice of rifle led to his eyes lighting up, an invitation back to his camper (another iconoclastic choice–It was the first all-fiberglass Canadian-built one I’d ever seen…), and an hour or so over coffee talking guns. The little 6.5 Mannlicher-stocked Zastava was his deer gun; he had another rifle in a really obscure (for North America…) 9.3X64 Brenneke. That one he had on the first Euro-style walnut stock I’d ever seen, with another equally esoteric Kahles scope on top of it. He had both rifles fitted with an obscure German Schwenkmontage mounting system, so he could take off the scope in brush and use the iron sights. Just talking to this guy, you got the impression he got at least as much out of using his own unique gear as he did the hunt itself, and he gloried in showing it off to someone who paid attention to such things. Average guy at the time was probably out there hunting with some Winchester Model 94 that he kept in behind the seat of his truck, but not this character.
I’ve run into such people all across the range of experience, and in some areas, I’m one of them. It’s interesting to see that many of them are only iconoclastic in their choices in certain limited areas, generally hobbies that they’ve taken up. All other aspects of their lives? Sheerest normality.
Although, I do remember one guy… I swear to God, if there was something popular, he’d chose something else 180 degrees away from it, just to be contrary. The man had to do everything differently. Even his wife–She was a very good-looking woman, but you’d have to characterize her beauty as “exotic”, because there was nothing conventional about her–All angles and planes that shouldn’t have worked together, but which in her case produced an effect that required your attention, no matter the circumstance. If you knew him, hadn’t met her, and then did run into her in some context like a work-related social function? Even without him being nearby, you instantly just knew that had to be his wife.
“Of the roughly 130,000 customers whose purchases were logged, a sizable fraction (about 25 percent) consistently took home products that bombed.”
This says to me monopolies / economies of scale cannot reach beyond a ~75% mark.
In the aspect of food, I am one of those people. If a new food product shows up that I like, (a particular brand of curry mayonnaise being a notable example), it will invariably be discontinued. I some cases I suspect the grocery company buyer bought a case on spec, and after it took me a year to buy and consume his test case, since nobody else did, he didn’t get it again.
Curried… Mayonnaise…?
Curried ketchup, I get–Anyone who did time in Germany will know why, but mayonnaise? That, I do not get, at all… What style of curry was it? The yellow, red, or green?
Flavor choices in other countries always leave at least some foreigners going “WTF? That? Really?”. I speculate that there’s something to the idea of a national palate, and while you can work within one, going outside the bounds and exploring isn’t for everyone. Some folks utterly hate what others love, and the sheer confusion of flavors just baffles them. Try to get anyone with a background in Asian cuisine to try blue cheese or Gorgonzola with rare beefsteak, and the look you’ll get in return is probably what most Americans would offer up if someone were to ask them to try thousand year-old eggs or that duck-egg embryo thing from the PI.
The ‘national palate’ idea does seem to have some merit, especially at the extremes.
John Derbyshire once did a column on English food in which he defended trad English cooking, as compared to postwar restaurant fare, as variable and full of rich flavours. I could see it, considering the variety of meats, cheeses, fishes the English had used, they had a limited spice palate but had horseradish and the rich at least had a similar cuisine to France in medieval and early modern times- so weird sweet/savoury combinations in sauces and pies, for example. Also, all parts of the animal. he noted that he, local African Americans, and a few Chinese were the only people who shopped at the wet fish market.
So the English have their tastes. Blood use in puddings and sausages, but lots of Europeans have that. That’s one of my questionable lines. I’ve never had black pudding, which is near enough to pure cooked blood. Yuck.
On the easier levels, flavours of potato chips ["crisps"]. They have combinations that strike me as perfectly normal like cheese and onion but which was not always common in Canada- we went for sour cream and onion. We seem to share salt and vinegar, even though Canadians mostly no longer remember this flavour combo on french fries, its origin.
They have hedgehog flavoured crisps. Never managed to try them.
I am always surprised to reflect that ketchup chips are supposedly uniquely, almost emblematically Canadian. America, the Land of Ketchup, seems not to have them. That’s plain weird.
With mayo, curry mayo seems bizarre. They are the matter and antimatter of flavour and texture. Yet it does work.
We can also get chipotle mayo- you must have that in the States, yes? American culture is practically defined by Mexican culture at this point, surely.
One of our national burger chains A&W seems to want to slap chipotle mayo on everything. It’s also a dip for sweet potato fries.
Another example of national palate- what to do with fries? Salt and Vinegar. Ketchup. Gravy. Mayo. Gravy and cheese curds. And so on.
Mmmmm.
The Aussies came up with a brilliant idea when they started slapping a fried egg on a burger. Oh yeah.
Graham, I feel an imperative need to point out the Australian predilection for beet root on burgers, along with the whole “Vegemite” thing. That jist ain’t right…
Although, I’ll second the egg thing, so long as it is with a runny yolk and a rare burger, charred on the outside. Anything that includes rubber egg and a well-done (is there a greater contradiction in terms in the English language than that…?) burger is strictly anathema and to be avoided at all costs.
Kirk,
Yes, I know that is probably a bad example, being a very niche thing, but it happens to me with more mainstream food products too.
In my defense, my dad grew up in Holland, so I commit the mayonnaise-on-fries heresy, in fact I put mayonnaise on just about everything.
Like the curry-wurst, (cheap curry powder in ketchup thing), that as you say, anyone who served in Germany knows about, there is a thing in Belgium called Joopy sauce, which is basically Indian yellow curry in mayonnaise, which is what I was talking about. It goes really well on another of my food quirks, lamb-burgers.
Up here in Canada, we have the President’s Choice brand in several related supermarket chains, and they had a line of gourmet mayonnaise, including garlic, curry, and horseradish varieties. I bought all three, but the curry got discontinued.
They have since added to the line, so now there is a chipotle, sirracha, buffalo wings, chimichanga, baconnaise and several others, including most recently, a joopy, so I have my curry mayonnaise again, but I am not sure for how long.
Yellow curry in mayo sounds like something I ought to try out… What brand of curry are you guys referencing for the flavors?
What’s interesting to me is observing the spectrum of curry from India to Thailand to Japan. Some of the Indian curry will remove porcelain, the Thai version is close to the same, but along a different flavor axis, while the Japanese are producing curries that really shouldn’t be termed such–They’re curry, but not as an Indian would know it.
It’s always interesting to observe the different cuisines, and their effect on those who aren’t familiar with them. I went out to do one of those “meet the local deals” for one Christmas in Germany, and I was served actual honest-to-God hassenpheffer as a Christmas dinner. As in, authentically rotted rabbit. Interesting experience for me, and I brought some back to “share” with one of my Filipino barrack-mates. This was essentially revenge for his consumption of Balut, and his keeping it in the communal fridge without warning anyone. One bite of hassenpfeffer, and his ass was off to the latrine for about an hour of gut-heaving. Apparently, there was something about the juniper berry that just didn’t agree with him, at all–He’d had close to the same reaction to Sauerbraten.
It’s all what you grow up with, I think. The guys who did the jungle survival instructor gig down at Fort Sherman in Panama were completely unable to cope with having our Panamanian First Sergeant (who’d grown up in said jungle…) demonstrate what was edible and not, during their block of instruction. Most of us weren’t, either–Some of the stuff that guy tossed down with nostalgic glee were things I’m not sure I could stomach if I were starving. But, you grow up poor in Panama, you have a different set of sensibilities. As an aside, he thought our mess hall was haute cuisine, and couldn’t understand why people complained about it…
Australian food is….well….something else.
Vegemite is a heretical product of the underworld, as anyone from any other Commonwealth country will cheerfully confirm. The Aussies were too cheap to pay royalties to the owners of the recipe of the One True Yeast Based Spread, namely, MARMITE!
A staple of childhood gastrointestinal illness, making dry toast palatable. The way I eat it today is to spread it on top of cheddar cheese on toast.
I have now belatedly realized that I have outed myself as one of Kirk’s “iconoclasts”.
I actually found myself quite interested in the odd European rifles he mentioned earlier, though I have no interest in 9.3 since it is very hard to get, and I admit to really liking and wanting a long wheel base Land Rover Defender Tdi, (an artifact of growing up in South Africa I suspect), but unlike the true iconoclast, I recognize the impracticality, so never did more than browse through the odd magazine.
Incidentally, the British Army occasionally surpluses off military Defenders from their leased based up here in Canada, but they are right hand drive and totally BER when let go, so not worth it.
When I could not get curry mayo, I made my own the same way the curry-wurst truck guys in Germany did, by adding cheap curry powder to Helmans (there is no other true mayonnaise unless you make your own). Raja or Robertsons’ brand, but really, any cheap curry powder will do.
I am not sure if Nando’s Portuguese/Mozambique Chicken Piri-piri restaurants have made it to the US. I know they are all over the UK and we have some in Canada. They have a Piri-piri suce, which is a little more red chili than Indian curry, but they also sell the sauce, and I can get it at my local supermarket, and the really hot one mixed in a little mayo makes it smoother and a bit milder.
As I mentioned, curry mayo goes really well with lamb.
I don’t know what the beetroot is like on a burger but I would try that. My mother made pickled beets when I was a kid and I still like them, albeit from the grocery store.
Vegemite I have never tried and it always sounded gross.
Then again, I tried marmite itself last year for the first time [neither of my British-born parents liked it so we never had it when I was a kid]. I suppose I’ll give it another go at some point but I believe the best use of onomatopoeia to describe my reaction would be “hooooaaagh.”
I like mayo fine as an “alternative spread” or a flavour-addition type dressing, like one would use ketchup or mustard, but when I moved from Toronto to Ottawa I was introduced to the idea that people could use it as an all-purpose grease in any situation where butter was used. That seemed like overkill to me but people here put mayo on everything all the time.
Though it did introduce me to the flavour combination of green relish and mayo on a burger at Harvey’s. Oh yeah.
With that Filipino guy- was it the juniper or the rottenness? Juniper can be a powerful & strange flavour in anything but its proper, gin-based, form, but rotten meat has always been a trigger for me. I’ll probably have to give that another try at some point too.
“…I was introduced to the idea that people could use it as an all-purpose grease in any situation where butter was used. That seemed like overkill to me but people here put mayo on everything all the time….”
Pretty much what my bother and I both do, although on sandwiches it will be butter on the bread and mayo as a topping. I don’t use mayo ISO butter on, for example, peanut butter on toast, or breakfast toast in general, but otherwise, if there is a meat component, the mayo goes on.
I had no idea Ottawa was a pocket of BENELUX culinary taste!
Kirk,
Interesting comment on cultural differences.
I would have expected that anyone who ate Balut would/could eat anything.
Interesting, as now that I think of it, Marmite is an example of exactly the phenomena you described. I have mentioned before that I have become something of a fan of Japanese Anime. There is a Youtube channel run by a western expat who lives in Japan and reviews Anime and Japanese pop culture.
He is famous enough, that for publicity purposes, a J-pop idol group arranged for him to play a popular Japanese game RPG/card game, with the loser eating unpleasant (to them) things. When he lost, they fed him various Japanese seafood items (urchin roe and similar stuff that they knew made westerners gag). When he won, he gave them Marmite flavoured chips and so on, since he knew from experience that Marmite simply cannot be tolerated as a flavour by Japanese people.
Paul,
Yes, that’s closer to how I think of mayo, I think, as “topping”, not “base grease.” No harm, no foul about how much or when it’s used as a topping. The surprise for me was always in the ubiquity I found up here.
I did also give some thought to the idea that foundational use of mayo was also, or instead:
- a generational change over time that I just happened to experience geographically
- an Americanization of our food culture that just happened around that time. I assumed ketchup long ago was this.
- an ordinary universal Canadianism from which I’d been arbitrarily insulated by chance and parental habits. Some elements of our household food culture were a bit British-inflected. We DID have mayo, though. Or its artificial cousin, Miracle Whip. And my dad was a prodigious ketchup applicator.
Question for you- ketchup on scrambled eggs, Y or N?
On Ottawa, in addition to mayo as spread, you’re right I did notice even back 20 years ago that it had appeared as a condiment for fries in about every pub. Now you can get it for that purpose in premium burger places and even at Harvey’s.
Ketchup on eggs is NO. A little black pepper usually.
But I should point out that I am an immigrant, and brought my mayo and Marmite with me from “home”, and though I have picked up many Canadianisms, ketchup on eggs is not one of them.
I also still drink a lot of tea, and suffered in my initial military service in that Canadians in general had gone through what you called the Americanization of our food, and coffee drinkers outnumbered tea drinkers. The field rations consequently only included tea in about ten percent of the time. I was forced to become a coffee drinker (or more of a coffee drinker) in consequence.
I dunno… Ketchup and a little Tabasco on top of the (US Army-style…) creamed beef overlain on top of scrambled eggs ain’t bad early morning eating.
There’s a lot of weirdnesses about staple foods across the Anglosphere, especially for breakfast purposes. You go to eat at an American military “dining facility”, and you’re going to find that the comestibles you’re offered are all stereotypical fare of the American South… Most of which are decidedly an acquired taste. Grits? Yikes. Unless heavily “cheesed and baconned”, as one of my friends put it, they’re usually horrible. The rest of it is generally bland and flavorless, although you may luck out and find an occasional cook who can turn out a decent omelette.
I usually put salt and pepper on eggs, occasionally Frank’s or Tabasco. ketchup on rare occasions- I thought it looked gross when my dad did it, but then I was also a rare Canadian kid then who didn’t like ketchup at all. Now I enjoy it once in a while, even on eggs.
In addition to drinking tea [but also coffee], and putting salt and vinegar as my number one fry topping, other British legacies for me include HP sauce and Worcestershire sauce.
Also both good on eggs, actually.
Kirk- don’t know if you ever had HP. It’s a brown sauce in a squared off plastic bottle to be found here shelved among similar products like A1 steak sauce. It has Worcestershire sauce in it directly plus other Worcestery ingredients like tamarind paste, so it tastes sweeter, slightly fishier perhaps, and with a different spice taste than barbecue style steak sauces. It’s unusual in being a British product still widely available in Canada without going to a specialty store. Although if you do go to a specialist in British goods, it reminds you that they have many additional flavours of HP besides regular.
When i was 12 or so my parents took me on annual cross border shopping and cultural acclimatization trips to Western New York. Mostly suburban Buffalo. One year a grand driving tour down to the Finger Lakes and Corning. We often ate in restaurants in the Eastern Hills Mall of Amherst, NY. They had a breakfast place of some sort and a Friendly’s.
I remember even then just as you say- the breakfast place had lots of perfectly familiar stuff to me, it being just across the border and the way of life similar, but Southern-inflected.
Grits for sure was on the menu. I think we tried them. Chicken fried steak, first time I heard of that.
The other thing was their mystification at my mother’s constant request for tea. They had it, always, no problem, they just had to distinguish out loud between hot and iced in a way Canadians generally wouldn’t. Tea without modifier is always hot tea for us. I assumed that was a southern thing and later introductions to southern tea culture cemented that belief.
I should also note I recently had a colleague of German birth who, at several work pot-luck occasions, produced currywurst in the form of a stew in a crockpot. If you are going to make anything with chopped up hot dogs, this is the way to do it.
Kirk,
Your reference to military breakfasts works both ways. When I was stationed in Dundurn at the ammo depot, I worked with a Warrant Officer from the Engineers, and he related how they often did joint maneuvers with the Brits at their leased training base in Suffield, Alberta, and how their nickname for the Brits was “shit-eaters”, as in;”We’re going on an exercise with the shit-eaters next week..”
This was mostly in reference to their field kitchen breakfast. Now for many people, the Full English Breakfast is proof of the advancement of civilization. Bacon, blood sausage, eggs, fried tomato and toast is wonderful (if you ignore the addition of the over-sweet baked beans), but the field kitchen variation where all the raw ingredients were dropped directly in a deep fryer for twenty seconds and then dumped (without draining), on your plate….
Likewise I recall a bit of a scandal when Canadian troops complained about the continental style breakfast served by the French in Bosnia…
LOL… Yeah, the Brits have some issues with their field kitchens. I made the mistake of eating at one once, for breakfast and the evening meal. I came to understand why the troops preferred their 24-Hour rations…
The military eating experience is quite the cross-cultural nightmare, sometimes. We were tasked to tear down one of the command post set-ups at a German kaserne, after REFORGER was over. Worked our asses off all day, and when we went to eat at the German mess facilities… Yikes. For some reason, they thought it appropriate to feed their “guests” at the Officer’s Mess, and all we had to show for dinner after working like dogs all day was a selection of cold cuts and brotchen, and not a lot of either. Meanwhile, we’re watching the German conscripts across the quad being fed great lashings of typical German enlisted food, which we could smell… Whatever it was, it had the most amazingly delicious odor wafting across to us, as we tried to make a meal out of some ham and dry bread. I have no idea why they didn’t want us over in the enlisted mess, but the Germans insisted we eat at the Officer’s Mess, and there we were, trying to be polite.
Thank God for the Kantine, where we finally got some real food at around eight in the evening. We probably spent a thousand dollars there on food and beer, and the little old lady who ran the place was ecstatic to have us there.
From what experiences I’ve had, the Canadian messes were insanely great. The worst meal I’ve had with Canadians made the best meal I ever had at a non-holiday Army or Air Force mess facility look like a sad joke. Friend of mine who was a sub crewman for a bit told me that even the boomer crews didn’t eat as well as the Canadian Army did in the field.
The French, from what little I saw of them in Europe during the 1980s, did not eat well at all, particularly the conscripts. Officers and NCOs reputedly ate like kings, but the enlisted guys did not. Our guys who went off to French Commando School came back bitching about that fact, while the leadership cadre raved about how well they ate. The whole thing was really kind of weird, because with the US, everyone eats the same crap, and there are no separate messes in garrison or the field. And, the troops always eat first, served by the leadership, if it’s a good unit. Far more egalitarian, in that respect–It’s not the greatest food, but everyone eats the same.
“…You go to eat at an American military “dining facility”, and you’re going to find that the comestibles you’re offered are all stereotypical fare of the American South… Most of which are decidedly an acquired taste. Grits? Yikes…”
I was stationed at Nellis AFB (in Las Vegas) and we had the best food. It was really good. I ate at many other chow halls and Nellis was always a bit better. I think it was because we had people from all over the world training there and they wanted to impress them maybe??? They had one of the best omelets I’ve ever tasted. Egg, ham, white mozzarella cheese and American cheese cooked on a griddle. SO GOOD. Breakfast was always good I would get off swing shift and go eat a massive breakfast for like $2 or some silly price like that. I would get an omelet, SOS, grits, couple slices of bacon, bowl of ceral and glasses and glasses(free refills) of milk. STUFFED.
For dinner on swing shift we had take out place with typical fried chicken with fried potato wedges and stuff like that. Hamburgers. Take out stuff.
Just curious if anyone else feels the same. I used to love chicken. Any kind, fried broiled, any kind, now…some of it makes me gag. Is it me or has the chicken taken on a ghastly taste in the last say 30 years???? I can barely eat chicken now it’s disgusting.
When I was at tech school we used to get rabbit every so often. It was good if greasy. We would joke that the chow hall people had spent all the food money up on beer blast so they had to shoot rabbits to feed us.