From The Past: June 17, 2008

Sometimes change is good and I can understand the reasoning why a company makes certain changes. However, there are those times when I wonder what are they thinking?

As a consumer, I am attracted to bright, flashy labels. I have heard that certain colors make a person want to buy a particular product over others. So, I wonder why a company would take a perfectly good-looking label like this one:

And turn it into this:

Without that flash of yellow, I believe this new label is plain and not appealing.

I thought the store had stopped selling this particular mayonnaise because the label had changed. This, to me, is another reason to keep things the same; consumers may buy something else because their eye doesn’t zoom in on the new, boring, label.

This was the old oatmeal box:

It was in a baby blue box and easy to read.

This is what I have to look for now:

This is a very basic box and the flavor is not near as visible and easy to spot on the shelf when it is among the other boxes which look the same. In other words, I actually have to take the time and read the boxes to make sure I am getting what I want. Before, it was much easier. I think these companies are equating health to boring, plain boxes.

As I said earlier, there are some changes which are good. For instance, this is the old Fried Ice Cream container:

It was a good box, but this is a better one:

It’s bright, flashy green and you can’t miss it. I don’t have to take time to read labels with this new container because no other flavor is this shade of green. (In Winchester, I have only seen this particular flavor available in Kroger.)

This last change is okay, but I hate to see something I grew up with completely change.

This was the old TGI Friday’s restaurant:

It was blue and very easy to identify. If you drove past a blue restaurant, you knew it was a TGI Friday’s. Now it looks this way:

It’s nice. It really is, but it tends to blend into all the other buildings which surround it. I won’t say it was a bad change, but I will miss the blue.

*Update 2024 I WISH that ice cream was still available, but I don’t believe it is. TGI Fridays didn’t last long after making these changes. They changed the outside, the changed the inside and they changed their menu. Now they are gone. Someone was listening to BAD advice 😉