NEWS: Congratulations, You're the Biggest International Corporate Assholes

CULTURE: Congratulations, You're the Biggest International Corporate Assholes

Consumers International revealed the winners of its International Bad Product Awards this week, and recipients included Coca Cola, Kellog's, Mattel, and Takeda Pharmaceuticals. My two favorites are Coke and Takeda. Let's start with the drugs. In case you're not familiar, Takeda Pharmaceuticals manufactures the sleeping pill Rozerem. Most likely you've seen their televised advertisements, which feature a sleep-deprived dude chatting with Abe Lincoln and a beaver in his kitchen.



Apparently Takeda ran a different ad last year, which was accused of marketing the sleep aid to children.

Accused of advertising that was "one step removed from dealing drugs near a school," Takeda pulled the ad after receiving a letter from the FDA warning them to "cease the dissemination of promotional materials for the drug featuring school children."

They also had to scrap an ad they had slated which featured a mother asking her elementary-aged children if they had brushed their teeth, washed their faces, and taken their pills. Back to the beaver, I guess.

Next up is Coca Cola, specifically for their marketing of Dasani bottled water. Bottled water is one of my favorite scams ever. By favorite, I mean most hated, and by scam, I mean you're a sucker if you buy and drink it. Dasani is way up there at the heights of said bottled water scaminess.

See, while they may market it as "pure," it's really just tap water. From local reservoirs.

Uh, yeah. Congratulations, Takeda and Coke. You're two of this years biggest corporate a-holes.

lewis black and DRE would be proud

Dasani is the equivalent of water through a brita pitcher. So is Aquafina. They never claimed to be spring water or anything. The labels say "purified water." Which could be swamp bilge run through an aquifer or something. It takes nothing more than reading the label to figure out that you're not getting any kind of premium product there.

I've thought for a long time that people who drink bottled water are pussies and idiots. What a tragic waste of only marginally recyclable plastic. People really are fucking morons...

I really, really hope that Coca-Cola is NOT bottling Dasani in the Atlanta area these days, since we are in the midst of a serious water shortage.

Yeah. This isn't really news to me. Coke isn't really doing anything wrong apart from taking advantage of stupid people.

buy a empty water bottle, fill it with tap. drink and save money. i mean seriously

Dasani was withdrawn from circulation over here a few years ago. Apparently purifying it by adding cancer wasn't allowed.

By over here i mean the uk. stupid lazyness not filling in e-forms.

Really? See, I've never considered anyone who drinks or buys bottled water a pussy. For me, drinking bottled water habitually indicates laziness and fiscal irresponsibility more than anything else.

+1

OK, they're just idiots. Big, fucking stupid idiots...

Judgmental assholes.

I drink tap water at home. At work, the tap water sucks, so I prefer bottled water. Never Dasanai as it tastes like ass to me.

Fuck you if you consider me a "Big, fucking stupid idiot"

The company I work for was even providing Dasani free for a while...I will would load up on a different bottled water to get through my day.

I hate that crap. But using bottled water in general is not always a sign of mental inferiority. Some places I have traveled to have horrid tasting tap water, and I would rather find a decent bottle of bottled water that tastes better than drink the city water in say...Atlanta. or Boston. Or most of LA.

That's cool. In 1978, they made a really cool horror movie called Alien. One of the small details that most people forgot about was that the spaceship in the movie (the Nostromo, to the uninitiated) was carrying oil harvested on another planet back to earth. They didn't need it for the petroleum, they needed it for the plastic. You know, for the bottles your water comes in, medical devices, that hermetically sealed packaging it seems like everything you buy at Home Depot or Circuit City comes in. That's the shitty thing about plastic; you can't really throw it away (it'll be around for tens of thousands of years after your children are dead), you can't really recycle it either. (Most recycled plastic does not meet specifications required for industrial use after even one or two times around.) You're right, plastic is really good for the environment and I should, instead of taking the effort to re-fill one bottle several times a day, purchase and drink at least eight of those convenient little eco-system grenades...Good thinking! (As far as tap water tasting like shit, that's kind of on us, since by not fighting it, we make it perfectly legal for our public (?) utilities to bring it to us in an increasingly polluted state.) Maybe instead of buying all that plastic, you could invest in something we smart people like to call reverse osmosis. (It's one of the ways you make water more pure.) Maybe a Brita pitcher? (It works for Dasani anyway...)

Horrorflick.

Come up with an alternative that does not use plastic bottles, and is more environmentally friendly.

Rather than sitting there whining about the way it is, change something.

This is what pisses me off about 99.9% of people that are rabid environmentalists. All they can do is complain and look down on everyone else. They never do a goddamn thing.

i have to ask how many of you people saying that those of us who drink bottled water are lazy and fiscally irresponsible have planned your retirement?

how many of you buy clothes instead of make them yourself? farm your own vegetables? butcher your own meat?

i mean really, the little bit of extra work that goes into these things is worth the marginal savings these activities (over long term investments) will bring...

we're big fucking stupid idiots? pussies and idiots? morons?

please. if you really want to make a point, get a pen and paper and write down your argument by candlelight. that's not lazy or fiscally irresponsible, nor does it hurt the environment (as long as you reuse the paper to wipe your ass with whatever drivel you manage to scrawl on it).

and somehow this still isn't as harsh as calling somone a pussy, moron, or big fucking idiot.

Ugh. You've never tasted Florida water then. Why do you think Florida voters are so fucked in the head? They drink the water.

I pretty much have to buy purified water, but not the fancy stuff, and I recycle the bottles.

+10

I think calling bottled water drinkers "lazy and fiscally irresponsible" is complicating the issue too much. "Stupid" suffices. I'm an environmentalist, but it's not even about that. You're paying $2-$5 for something that is essentially worthless. That's stupid, no matter what way you look at it.

The biggest problem with tap water isn't the taste, it's that it's not cold enough. Fill something with tap water and keep it in the fridge and it'll probably be indistinguishable from bottled water.

Dasani is everywhere, even on Mars. Good luck escaping that tidal wave.

...and killing union organizers at their plants in Colombia and sucking all the water out of farmland in India before they poison it.

There was a spoof ad in Adbusters a few years ago with a glass of water and the slogan "Can't beat the real thing." Google image search has failed me. Can we add them to the list?

I think most people know Dasani water is just filtered tap water. They just want cold water, so they pick it up at the 7-11 or whatever instead of a Coke. The fact it costs so much is funny, but if they can sell it for that, that's fine. I think it's actually more expensive in most places. What is funny is that Evian costs about the same (maybe a little more) and it's imported from France.

Think so? Read this...

Please do suggest something.

Not to mention energy. The oil it takes to package, transport and market bottled water outweighs the waste of the plastic used to contain it. Glass bottled water is no better, insofar as it costs much more to ship it (especially if they're shipping it from Europe to markets in the US and elsewhere).

Take the No Bottled Water Pledge.

I hate hippies. "Kill all Hippies" by Primal Scream is one of my favorite tracks by them. (Yes, I know that's not what they mean, but still...) White people with dreadlocks who wear patchouli make me want to kill something. Yes, they anger me, but not nearly as much as self-important assholes who still refuse to see that the beautiful little ball of rock that we've inhabited for millions of years will not be able to support us for much longer because of...US!!! (To reference a particularly bad movie, "humans are the only species unable to establish an equilibrium with the environment.". Or something like that. Being the nihilist that I am, I really shouldn't give a fuck. Everything and everyone will end up as nothing sooner or later, why should I care what a lot of other assholes do? Fuck, I don't know...