“Harbinger households” consistently buy products that get discontinued (2019)
boingboing.net
boingboing.net
All.The.Time.
that Amazing Neutrogena conditioner, which was really good and lasted a year? Gone: if it lasts a year, its too good.
that original low-sugar chex? gone. we invented three new flavours.
that jam? gone. butter? gone. that cut of meat? gone. those pens? I mean pentel pens. How can pentel can an entire line of really good, fine writer ballpens? Gone. Sorry dude, it was you and your partner, thats IT. we checked inventory, we were shipping the last box to your category killer store two years before we canned it. It was you and some wierd hobo in Chiba were the last ones buying.
Wilkinson Sword made 30cl shaving foam cans, mostly supplied to the airline business for Business class passengers. Gone. That was the good stuff. I have to scrabble around for a Nivea gel in the same form factor, its hard to find.
My partner and I feel like the harbinger of doom for products a lot, we have dreamed of renting ourselves out to the highest bidder, to go and buy competitor product. We even called ourselves this before I read the term. We joked about being the kiss of death in shops, and then it became un-funny to the point we're scared to tell shopkeepers how much we like products sometimes.
(for the ones we want, we'd buy a LOT. That neutrogena shampoo is $40 a bottle now in the ebay hoarder bins. Neutrogena triple moisture daily deep conditioner. It used to be like $7. I have two bottles coming via a reseller, thats another year before we have to find a different conditioner.)
Grape Nuts. They're next. Trust me, Post is going to be reading the interwebs and my supplies of Grape Nuts will dry up.
Wierdly, we are high income, we are not buying dead real estate and out voting useless candidates (Green, Labor, our candidates do very well). So I think the article has over-compensated somehow.
Maybe we're up market Harbingers of Doom. Bespoke. Artisanal.
I got to the point where if I really liked a pair of shoes, I'd buy a second pair and throw them in the closet for nine months, and cross my fingers that I like the shoes in the second refresh more than I liked the ones in the first one.
And lets talk about ya'll motherfuckers wearing jeans that make your eyes pop out. Stores I used to shop at, some of them don't even have regular jeans anymore. I was the first person off the tight jeans bandwagon the last time that went around, and I'm not jumping on this one, even if that means I have to shop at thrift stores until you all wake up on your own, or until your doctor tells you to stop wearing those if you want kids.
Full leather sports sandals, with strong but easy-to-operate magnetic clasp, and no seams on inner surfaces. Joy to wear. Practically immune to chafing and blisters. Exceptionally good for walking (or cycling!) for even long periods of time.
Discontinued since ~2009 or so. While they've brought back some of their other pretty good sandals, the perfection reached more than 15 years ago is nowhere to be seen.
The difference between the old ones that those pictured above are that the old ones were (I think this is the right word) almost suede leather. Really easy on skin. And the sandals in the image show seams on the inside, whereas the ones I had two pairs of had their seams on the insides of the strap structure. But on the bright side, the magnetic clasp looks familiar; the new clasp is bulkier and can't be easily opened with a toe from your other foot.
And no, it's not these either: https://www.picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/255580935375_/Clarks... - but they do demonstrate how to construct sandals with the seams off of skin contact, so this might give you an idea what the things looked like.
So no, sadly I can only provide reasonable excuses.
These shoes are particularly durable and will last through absurd amounts of use and sweat and rain and mud with just some sink-washing, but eventually break down and need replacing. For me it's about every 4-5 years with them getting worn most days of spring/summer/fall.
Shopping for these shoes is a huge hassle because, outside of large cities / cycling destinations, most shops only carry a single brand and model, making them pretty much mail order only. A shoe that fits fine can feel problematic after a couple hours, so it takes a bunch of trial and error (and often purchasing multiple pairs and selling the others off as barely-used) to find what works.
Last time I had to replace my shoes I went and bought the same brand, same model, same size. But they didn't fit right. Turns out the new version was 5mm narrower at the ball of the foot, which was enough to make my left foot hurt after an hour of wearing them.
So, I had to go shop around for something that fit better, try them, then be sure they worked right. I went through three pair before finding something that works, but I'm loathing when it comes time to replace them again. The coloring on them was recently changed and while I don't really like it (it's now a silver toe on black shoe, previous was all black), I guess it'll be fine so long as the fit matches?
I'm wishing I'd bought a second pair, but that too bothers me knowing they'll sit on the shelf for years taking up space before getting used. And who knows, maybe some new buckle/latch/whatever will come out in the mean time that'll make switching brand worthwhile?
I’m very unhappy.
The struggle is real.
While part of it might be that my body and running style have changed slightly over time, most of it is that shoes change regularly. I experienced a first recently thought: my feet actually significantly prefer the newer SpeedGoat design to the previous revision (though I fear the heal design might encourage more little stones & bits into the shoe, it is more comfortable for me). Just watch them revert those changes, so in future when I need to replace this design will be hard or impossible to find at a good price...
Are those a scarce resource or something?
And presumably as your weight changes you would need new models.
Heck I'm surprised there aren't more "smart shoes" that track weight changes and mobility.
They completely changed the shoe this last year.
I’ve adjusted but… it’s not the same shoe anymore.
If you just buy classic old-fashioned stuff, then you won't have this problem. I have a pair of old-fashioned leather boots, and when they were worn out after 5 years or so, I just bought exactly the same boots again. Those type of boots have been available for decades, and I really doubt they'll stop making them anytime soon.
For jeans, I've been wearing plain Levis 501 for years, and when they break I just buy another pair. They might be making slight changes, but for the most part it's the same pair of jeans and it's always available in plain styles.
Same for the plain T-shirts I wear. Sure, colors change a bit every year, but I won't have trouble finding a replacement a few years.
This problem only exists for people who buck fashion trends in areas (like clothes) that are highly subject to fashion. I just want to keep buying the same type of clothes, but they keep going in and out of fashion without me having any say in it.
For jeans, for example, I would love to be able to buy black 527s. That shouldn't be too much to ask, should it? But they don't exist, because they're flares, which are currently out of fashion for men, so tough luck.
But even for the most reliably unchanging style of boots I have bad luck: army boots. Used to wear them all the time. Always great fit, comfortable under all circumstances. Bought a new pair a few years ago, and suddenly they suck. I'm forced to wear sneakers these days. I haven't really find a nice model yet.
I used old spice anti-perspiring deodorant for like 20 years. It had never changed. It was like $1-2 and I liked it fine.
One day they started advertising and added like 20 new flavors and had super handsome spokesmodels. I couldn’t find my boring old flavor any more.
So even old and boring things can get the ax
We see what you did there.
Wearing jeans at all is a trend. People have been wearing something other than jeans for far longer than they've been wearing them.
> Shoes are this way for a lot of people, in that some of us can keep a
> pair of shoes long enough that the next fashion cycle has happened and
> you can't find anything like that again.
And take a gander at the shoes they're wearing? ))
My experience as a man on the other hand... I bought a tuxedo recently, and the tailor said Ok here's this one, it has these weird lapels that are in right now, and it'll be great if you're going on the red carpet tomorrow but will be out of fashion pretty soon, otherwise here is the standard tux that will always look good, and come back and buy a vest or cummerbund if they ever come back in style and you'll still look great.
Sanuk is a west-coast US sandals brand which had been around for decades and used to make some of the best most-comfortable flip flops. These are not the sandals that fall apart in the middle of a vacation or give you blisters.
In the last few years they lost their soul and started using "yoga mat" -- an open-cell foam -- for most their sandals.
I spent over an hour on the phone trying to explain to them why sandals which get wet and STAY WET all day were such a problem. Born in surf culture, and honestly couldn't care less.
At least for the trails I can so far reliably get shoes that fit, although even there there's none to be had in town, they have to be ordered.
It probably depends on the material of the sole, though.
Try working from home. It's guaranteed that by the time you need new shoes nothing resembling your current shoes that you know and love is available any more.
Same for a lot of other clothing items that you only wear outside.
If you look further you can find high-quality denim and t-shirts in a variety of cuts. Even bespoke. But they differentiate on quality and things that matter to enthusiasts, so a brain poisoned by mass-produced fast-fashion will wince.
Take a look at Duluth Trading Co. for a similar trend, if a bit more upmarket.
Laggards: Laggards are consumers who avoid change and do not adopt new technologies until all traditional alternatives are no longer available. The group is mostly concerned with reliability, low cost, and easy to use.
As I remember the premise, vendors squeeze profit out of the earlier adopters, in particular the early majority and the late majority. By the time the laggards are buying, the vendor has lost interest in the product and all of the profit has already been extracted. Therefore they don't give a shit about you and are likely to discontinue the product or provide terrible support.
I need a Laggard t-shirt.
Sounds about right. These days it's all about things lasting about 2 minutes so they're cheap to manufacture, as pricey as possible to seem designer or premium, and hardly any time spent on making good UX at all.
Worse is when some UX designers decide to improve a product that works well as it is only to make it worse and convoluted. This has been my experience more often than not, and my solution is to simply stop using such products. It sucks.
I'm often a power user. I know all the features and shortcuts of the tools I use. All too often, these get removed. I recall being on a feedback call with a UX study, and complaining about a feature I use, and many friend use, that was recently deleted from the product. "Oh, no one uses that" was the response from the UX/PM.
Skin care companies are the worst. After ages of comparing products and finally finding the right one, they just "improve" the formulas to the point that the product just does not work anymore for us. Even the expensive ones like Vichy. I started to look more seriously into home-made cosmetics because of reproducibility, but haven't found the right formula yet unfortunately.
However, I try to use primary products (for example pure hyaluronic acid instead of a product that contains HA) as much as possible, because I feel this lowers the risk to run out of that product,
I don't remember any of the names or percentages ("they're all just rows in a database to me"), but perhaps I should have paid attention a bit more closely. I am assuming that all of these substances are available for public purchase, and the people behind the RnD lab weren't eminently qualified in their field.
Good luck to you!
While finding person or team that will consistently pick winners is basically impossible due to viral nature of big wins, I consistently pick losers . I assume it's because I consistently use criteria which differ radically from average consumer. I'll go into detailed list of pros and cons while my cousins will simply say "I like it" or "it's cool".
I thought Penny arcade had a strip or blog about it but I could never find it...
Tbh, lots of non-overpriced products that I really like tend to disappear or be hard to find, so I just learned to settle for (a) a healthy enough cheap enough alternative that is never close to being as enjoyable but "whatever, it works", or (b) an X times more expensive quasi-luxury-class equivalent that has similar qualities and is from a common enough quasi-luxury-class producer with big market presence.
But there's a second avenue of though to explore: some people care for the qualities of the product itself, and some might argue that these kinds of people (we?) are a minority, most follow trends, either marketing phabricated or grass-roots word-of-mouth trends, so if a good quality products fails to be trendy, it will have horrible economical performance at least compared to the expectations set for such a product (R&D spent and all), so has higher chances to get pulled off than a bad performing low end products, that will stick around for more, and might by sheer luck "catch a trend" at some point.
Personalized production is what will save us in the end I guess, but when it reaches mainstream will also coincide with most people becoming jobless, so I don't know how the quality of goods and life will look like overall then, can't find my crystal ball :) (I guess the utopian scenario would be that anything mass-produced even decent quality is dirt cheap by then and affordable on UBI, and all the made-to-order-by-robots will be the various degrees of luxury - white sneakers? 0.01$ same model but factory made with dotted texture on violet gradient and printed with the face of your cat? 1000.00$, and hand-customized post-factory might be the new mid-class as human labour could become cheap again?)
> [A breakfast cereal containing] whole grain wheat flour, malted barley flour, sugar (maltose), salt, dried yeast, and the following added vitamins and minerals: iron, vitamin B3, zinc oxide, vitamin B6, vitamin B1, and folic acid.
> According to the Grape-Nuts website, Grape-Nuts "actually contains neither grapes nor nuts". The name may have come from the cereal's resemblance to grape seeds, or from its nutty flavor; C. W. Post may also have intended it to refer to its content of glucose, which Post called "grape sugar."
I kid, but it's rather unlike any other breakfast cereal in its texture.
It was fashionable decades ago as a healthy cereal and promoted by the famous Euell Gibbons, who would eat just about anything from nature. He is the reason that I have never shied away from sampling wild berries or leaves once I understand which plants grow in my area. There really are a lot of edible things that are overlooked since processed food is so easily obtained here in the US.
The experience of eating Grape Nuts can really be elevated by adding fresh or dried fruit and nuts like roasted pecans, roasted almonds, roasted walnuts, or similar nuts or you could substitute candied nuts coated with honey, cinnamon sugar, praline, etc.
Personally, if I ever eat Grape Nuts again they will be used as a topping on ice cream combined with dark chocolate syrup or fudge, some nuts, and a little dried fruit. This gives the ice cream an awesome texture boost and the melding of the flavors is fantastic.
I currently use home-made granola base as a breakfast and spruce it up with various things every morning so the flavor experience doesn't get old. My wife makes excellent granola and it is super simple. Oats are one of my favorite grains.
I have used piloncillo in Tex-Mex cooking - moles and other spicy sauces to add a little sweetness. I never thought about using it somewhere else.
I'm down for honey on just about anything. I usually make a wash for my baby-back ribs with a honey base and some chile spices like ancho or gaujillo or chipotle. It really elevates the ribs when you brush it on when you are nearly at the end of smoking.
The first one that really stuck in my mind is BetaMax and I suppose the collapse of Be, makers of the BeBox and BeOS, was the most discouraging... though I've seen a lot of other brands & companies I liked fail.
Maybe your particular issue is with products starting with "be"
I just wish I could figure out how to monetize my prescience
I view the collapse of Be as story about the many failings of the broader tech industry and the irrationality of the dot com bubble and not in any way an indication of the technical merits of the BeBox or BeOS.
Anyway, Haiku as it is today is kinda like what BeOS was back then but obviously incomplete in several really important ways. Meanwhile the world has moved on and I do everything I used to do in BeOS (and more) with Linux. Though I do wonder what BeOS might look like now had they not collapsed back then.
https://www.epaderm.com/products/epaderm-ointment/
I initially got this as an eczema ointment - it's a thick, waxy ointment intended to treat dry and irritated skin. But somehow, you can mix it with a bit of water and form a rich lather (their "cleanser" use case). It doesn't form tall, stiff piles like canned shaving foam, but it's more than adequate to lather your face with. And it works fantastically: the razor glides over my skin, and there is absolutely no irritation. In fact, my skin is in better shape after i've shaved than before.
https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/37805/foun...
Now our burgers are flavoured with a tinge of sadness and regret.
If they've stopped selling a product, what choice do you have if your burgers are tasting like sadness?
Also: 11" MacBook Air. Strawberry Shortcake SkinnyCow ice cream sandwiches. McCormick Perfect Pinch Tuscan Seasoning with Sun Dried Tomato.
I used to care about such things. Then I just embraced the inescapable endless change, and started using soap.
If you wet your hair first, then put on the soap, I find it not too bad.
Just embrace it. Because they just keep changing stuff.
Here’s hoping for a revival of the 12” MacBook with an M series chip. That’d be so good.
Actually come to think of it. If I love a product it's rare I can ever find it again.
The 16" was first released in 2019, and has always had both integrated and discrete GPUs. I do think the connectivity configuration is a little restrictive and one dimensional, but there's no way you could convince me to use a 17" 2011, what with it being limited to USB 2.0 and FW800 (no thunderbolt!). Thankfully this point is moot, because the 2021 16" MBP has really great connectivity.
I'm confused by your comment about weight -- you actually want a heavier computer? The 2021 16" is 30% lighter than the 17" and smaller in all three dimensions. The 2021 16" MBP GPU is light years ahead of even the previous generation 16", let alone the 17" from 2011.
I'm pretty happy to just continue with the old.
But Heinz roast garlic deli mayo, you will be missed. And freschetta pizza, and eatemans carrot cake, and pop with sugar in, and small phones with decent battery life.
Because I travel a lot I favour carry-on only, which means small quantities of toiletries and I wet shave with foam. At one point it was easy to buy small shaving foam cans for travel and at some point they got replaced with gel. I dislike the gel.
One day in the Coop in Davos I saw a whole section of travel stuff and there they had Nivea Shaving Foam (https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Sensitive-shaving-practical-trave...). This seems to be available in German-speaking countries. That day I bought the entire stock on the shelf (something like 10 of them).
Please don't jinx us like this!
You can just squirt some straight onto the (wet) brush and get latherin' - straight onto your face.
Having to shave those last remnants of hair off my head is bad enough without it taking up half the prep time I grant myself each morning :)
Since I was young, I always loved spicy vegetable sandwich spread, but for many years I thought it had been discontinued, because this giant chain sold all the other flavours, but not my favourite. Until I discovered it at a different chain, and became aware of their betrayal. Then they introduced their home brand organic vanilla ice cream which I loved, so they quickly discontinued it. They did have same home brand organic chocolate ice cream which tasted far better than home brand ice cream has any reason to (it reminded me more of Australian), so a bit later they discontinued that too. A popular A-brand desert had a lemon-variety with a particularly addictive taste, and while they didn't discontinue it entirely, they did stop selling it online and in most of their supermarkets (only the very largest still had it).
But none of that has anything to do with me; it's just the supermarket chain that clearly has some grudge against me.
Good news: they recently started stocking my favourite sandwich spread flavour again.
Our store would continually run out of the particular baby food we wanted and the cashier noticed me buying it all when it was in stock and asked if I wanted them to just order another box for me.
This doesn't help when the suppliers have discontinued it, and some of the larger chains are all automated, but it can be a useful trick. The computers try to notice what sells and order more (I've bought all of a certain item and noticed they stocked twice as much the next week, for example) but sometimes it can be assisted.
You can also email the company/distributor and ask for retail locations in your area, they'll usually know.
Dear God. Never, I hope. There was even a Grape-Nuts shortage in 2020 [0], but thankfully it's over and I think Post understands how much the cereal means to its consumers.
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/shopping/2021/03/24/gra...
This is an interesting finding no matter what, but I think part of the splash comes from the idea that some people might be harbingers _independent of the rest of their identity_. Since it's not obvious that liking crystal pepsi and watermelon oreos are related, we can speculate that the people inherently like doomed products.
On my read, there's a more boring hypothesis that is equally supported: in any given period, some demographics (age, income, cultural -- all the stuff that we know gets clustered geographically) are more profitable than others. The products of the less profitable demographics get discontinued.
The main difference between this and the "harbinger" hypothesis is whether you can make surprising predictions. The paper doesn't really prove its predictive case because the calibration and holdout data come from different products in the same time period -- meaning that information about the time period leaks into the model that wouldn't be available if you were truly running a prediction.
If you feel like you yourself are a harbinger of product doom, maybe you're just a part of a group that isn't making enough money for sellers! Your choice whether to call that unfair or a victory :)
I suspect the reality is that both types exist. The article says harbingers tend to clip coupons more. This implies they may be price-sensitive, lower income or perhaps trying to stretch their lifestyle beyond their means. To me, harbingers sound like people who are open to trying novel things but also tend to make quicker, perhaps ill-considered decisions. Over time this would lead to a trend of making poorer choices on average, such as remaining in zip codes where the negatives might outweigh the positives but not obviously so at first glance - explaining another finding of the study.
I've occasionally had strong preferences for product features clearly not valued as highly by the majority of the market. That means sometimes I have to seek out or pay more for the items I prefer. However, I'm not at all price sensitive when it comes to products that differentiate themselves in ways which are important to me. Also, I almost never clip coupons.
Conversely, when I judge a cheaper product to be equivalent in the ways that matter to me, I'll go for the cheaper one - all other things equal (ie I wouldn't drive to another store to save 75 cents). Other times, products with features I find uniquely valuable fail in the market because there aren't enough others who value those features. But I also have a large number of examples where I was very early to a product niche which was not a 'thing' but then grew into a sub-category popular enough to be sustainable and competitively profitable. An easy example is mechanical keyboards. I was one of those people seeking out old IBM keyboards and adapting the old big DIN connectors to USB. A decade later I was participating in group buys to get good mechanical keybs. Now, another decade on, I can walk into Best Buy and find three or four mechanical keyboards. I'm unusual in that I'll pay >$500 for the exact keyboard I want yet seek out a very particular brand & model of shirt or pants I prefer from Costco or Wal-Mart despite being the cheapest, apparently undifferentiated offering. But in those cases, it's always because of specific features that item uniquely possesses over others. When friends ask me about some of my less conventional product choices I can explain in detail exactly why this one is objectively better to me than the others. In many cases, following such conversations my friends end up adopting either the product or at least the previously under-valued differentiating feature.
A personal example of the negative outcome (failed product) would be the Zazzle, a cool toy which ultimately failed in the market despite my buying one when I saw it at retail. My Zazzle is sitting on the bar in my game room and once discovered by friends becomes a favorite. One friend told me they tried to get one on eBay only to find them selling for hundreds of dollars. I have a higher than usual rate of having discontinued products I bought when new which are now selling for multiples of original MSRP. I didn't buy them because I thought they'd go up in value, I just tend to buy stuff I want if I see unique value in it.
* Tzatziki Quinoa Basil and Garlic Triscuits, but not Original or Low-Sodium. * Apple Honey Nut Ancho Kobe Beef Cheerios, but not Cheerios. * Mango Chutney Cranberry with Turmeric & Essence of Nightshade juice, but not Cranberry
see also: potato chips, hummus, frozen waffles
Panic! Maybe I shop at a Harbinger Store [tm].
Hurts my eyes. SciHub URL + DOI (10.1177/0022243719867935) works for me.
Isn't this kind of expected? Companies will give out coupons for products that don't sell so well. The higher the coupon value, the more desperate the company to get rid of this stock.
So if these households like to coupon a lot, that means they accept less than ideal market fit for a price reduction.
In my experience working retail, this just isn't the case, in general - unless it has changed in the last decade. Coupons have a couple of purposes: Loyalty and foot traffic, much like sales, and often on things they make a decent profit on. You wind up seeing Tide laundry soap, Gillette razor blades, and so on. CVS gives coupons on CVS brand items to promote their store brand... which keeps folks coming back to buy stuff they make a decent profit on.
Coupons are very likely to happen on new products, too, as a way to entice folks to buy them.
It also costs money to put out coupons, either physical or digital, in no small part because you have many retailers that need reimbursed and coupon fraud is definitely an issue as well.
Simply put: Coupons are an advertising device.
Often, products that aren't selling well are either taken back by the manufacturer (to be sold at places that sell discontinued stuff) or marked down by the retailer with absolutely no fanfare (like a coupon). Folks that coupon a lot (or extrememly) are often getting new or established products at a good price instead of things they won't find in 3 months.
Things that aren't selling get discounted or clearanced, which can be fun when they overlap - you get the original coupons designed to promote the product, and the product flopped, so it's on discount, but the system still allows the coupon to apply to it - sometimes to nearly zero or even negative (most registers don't allow negative amounts anymore).
But it IS possible to figure out who is cool: you can find the people who regularly jump on trends before anyone else, and see what they buy.
But this! This is almost as good: you can figure who is NOT cool.
Finally, a system of perfect justice.
At times, I will spend an inordinate amount of time and brainpower researching products and comparing them for value. I will scour the Internet for the best price, research the maker, look for alternative brandings of the same thing and then look for additional discounts and deals and purchasing schemes.
I think that sometimes, I end up finding that product that companies lose money on and those products or services tend not to last. Or at least not in the form that I was previously purchasing them.
> Households that leave harbinger zip codes tend to go to other harbinger zip codes.
Since they also claim that house prices in harbinger zip codes increase less than other areas, then this just sounds like people from poor areas moving to other poor areas.
> The findings indicate that harbinger zip codes are less likely than other zip codes to donate to the candidates who receive the most donations in their three-digit zip code.
There can be huge differences between two areas with the same three-digit zip codes. A rural or suburban area can easily have the same three-digits as a downtown urban area. It would make sense for a people in two starkly different areas to support different political candidates and for the candidate supported by the more populous urban area to win.
> The researchers also claim that harbinger households voluntarily cluster: that when a harbinger household moves, it is likely that it will move to another habringer ZIP code (and nonhabringers move to nonhabringer households). Moreover, harbingers don't appear to learn their preferences from one another — a nonhabringer household that locates in a harbinger ZIP code doesn't alter its purchasing and political contributions to "loser" products and candidates.
A “Habringer” is someone who brings the “Ha”.
Being older, poorer, and "out of touch" with what's fashionable, politically, culturally, and market wise -- because you have other problems and you're at the very far side demographically of anybody marketeers, press, etc. attempts to even influence...
Or it could be that they tend to lean toward new stuff, and 80% of new stuff is crap, so 80% will be discontinued relatively quickly.
Sometimes. Sometimes it also might be a process change.
There is a desert people in Hungary quite like. It's basically a bar of cottage cheese coated in chocolate. [1]
One day the factory manufacturing it received a huge amount of inquires about a recipe change. The only problem was that they haven't changed anything. As far as they could tell everything was the same as it always used to be. But still there were a lot of very vocal costumers demanding the old taste so they went and investigated.
According to the story what happened is that the logistic provider improved the refrigeration in the supply chain. Because of the cottage cheese these deserts require refrigeration. Of course they were already using refrigerated trucks, but there was some transshipment centre where the refrigeration was missing or not very effective. And what changed is that they fixed that.
So basically the old taste, the one people demanded back, was the result of the cottage cheese just a tad bit bit ripe from the heat during transport.
https://www.traderjoesgroceryreviews.com/trader-joes-hot-sau...
Not quite a sauce, but it works for me.
Stores for months in a fridge. Communist Romanian recipe.
and in general, whatever bacteria can grow in a medum rich enough in salt + whatever acid (lactic if you're fermenting, citric or acetic otherwise) is probably not gonna hurt you too bad (salmonella and all the nasty stuff require protein + mostly towards neutral or alcaline environment).
sure, if you're into pickled eggs or weird stuff like that, watch out, but any sour pickled vegetables are safe and even if they go off will not make you seriously ill, they'll just start tasting like s and mess your stomach a tid bit.
In grocery stores here in the US I can buy pickling vinegar which is 9% acetic acid versus 5% for the normal stuff. Regular old 5% vinegar is around 2.5ph.
Supposedly you can just top up the vinegar once it starts to get low
They have also told me when things are out of stock, rather than discontinued, so I assume it was actually discontinued.
When it comes to consumer products, I've just come to accept that my favorite beers or sodas or cheeses or candies will only be available for a short while, but I don't think that's anything to do with the harbinger phenomenon. I'm just a bit more willing than most to step away from my already-favorite brands and try something new, which means trying lots of things that have an inherently higher chance of not gaining traction in the market.
If she really likes a place that guarantees it will either close or change so she no longer favors it.
I think it's that she's looking at value as well as the food, she's very good at finding places that aren't charging enough for good food.
>enormous laptops with hot swappable bezels and deprecated ports
>small phones
>other outdated dead technologies
I see your point but.. having "Crystal Pepsi" just seems weird from a branding point of view, why not just call it Sprite? Like, what's the expectation of what that would taste like? It's like saying "7-UP root beer", it's just really not clear what flavor I should expect upon drinking it.
I have the same issues with other postmodern mashup fast foods, like, I've seen taco pizza and pizza flavored tacos. Make up your mind, are you a pizza or a taco? Such an abomination is a challenge to all existing categories of being.
We, as a society, drink intense dyes every day largely because of the legacy of prohibition... weirdly colored sodas were the social camouflage for "medicinal" liquor. Surely this brightly colored froth-tube can't be harmful!
This rolled into the marketing illustrations of the mid-20th century.
On a utilitarian level all sodas should be clear.
One person worked the paper's methodology backwards and came up with a list of potential candidate cities: https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/i3hb3c/til_t...
Kind of shocked me that I'm nowhere near any of those, as I feel like one of those harbingers (and I feel no desire to move to any of those places).
Harbinger sounds so negative. How about long tail or hipster?
https://modwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=248954
The chip which is at the heart (or maybe the liver-- it makes a great filter as well) of so many synthesizers?
Is donating to political candidates that common? It sounds pretty odd.
though i guess even there it's probably a rather small percentage of the population that actually cares enough about individual candidates to donate money to them.
[0] https://time.com/5757711/bernie-sanders-34-million-q4-fundra...
- Any store I notice as I walk by might be gone in 2 years
- Any store I walk into is likely to be gone in 1 year
- Any store I actually buy something from has about 6 months left...
(this only applies to small stores. The anchors can live on in zombie mode for decades)
There are clearly no harbingers in my county then!
So to use the word "Harbinger" which for most people will have greater negative connotations by virtue of the common phrase "harbinger of doom" in most English speaking people's lexicon, would suggest an element of psychological profiling is being carried out in plain site on ycombinator, although it can be played down as just a clickbait headline, no different to the techniques used by journalists and editors of "reputable" news outlets.
Either way, its getting even easier to identify the people who are worth manipulating to win elections in a country, rendering the election process not "free and fair process" so easily trumpeted out by Western democracies.
I might just place a bet on Trump winning the next US Presidential election because there are more Republicans owning and running a business than Democrats!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-business/wp/201...
The last half of you comment seems completely unrelated to the article?
This is another attempt to run with the idea with some variation. https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty-research/sites/faculty...
Harbinger Customers is also a phrase coined.
Its out there, its just a question of time before someone picks up the ball and runs with it. You can track idea's snowballing online, like this one.
Research papers like this tend to have more gravity if they are focused at those with money to spend, so this latest twist will certainly get some attention from businesses.
Savvy Political Campaign organisers will also be aware of this development when targeting their efforts for future upcoming US Presidential elections with current legislation in place.
The Surveillance Capitalism that exists for businesses to identify and target individuals can equally be applied to political campaigns, helped along with favourable media coverage from political donors product or service advertising budget to sever the direct link to comply with legislation.
Its not a cynical take on the world, its the nuanced way the world works, something even the press dont like drawing attention to, so you dont ever see any decent investigative journalism now a days.
The world is all bought and paid for, as some would say!
Their comment is implying that this research is part of a larger academic bias against and attempt to publicly disparage political conservatives, Republicans, and/or rural people.