An ominous sleight-of-hand is occurring all over Supermarket Land. Food products and packaging are slowly getting miniaturized.  For years manufacturers have been progressively selling us less product for more money. But over the past two years, the shaving-of-contents has been getting as obvious as America’s prodigious waistlines. Maybe the manufacturers are on a quest to help us with our obesity. But I don’t think so. I think they’re ripping us off. If they keep up this pace, pretty soon, we’ll all be buying empty boxes.

Take national brands of canned tuna, for example. Have you noticed that the old six-ounce can is now a five-ounce can? You could say this was an effort to save us from extra mercury poisoning, but the truth is more sinister. They are trying to STARVE US. I used to be able to make two, normal-sized tuna sandwiches from one can. Now I can make only a sandwich and a half from their new anemic can. What? Did they think we wouldn’t notice that we didn’t have enough tuna to make two normal sandwiches? Aside from sandwich making, look at any other recipe that calls for tuna. The directions state to use “one six-ounce can of tuna.” Well, that only leaves Trader Joe’s tuna because they still have the decency to sell their tuna in six-ounce cans. Forget Chicken-of-the-Sea (which is an apt name for a company that rips off their customers but aren’t upfront about it) or Starkist or any of the major brands, they’ve all gone to five-ounce cans. Bastards!

Not only have they stolen tuna from me, this Christmas the food people really crossed a line when they messed with my sugar. I was shopping at my local Safeway and saw sugar was on sale. I wanted it for holiday baking, but was concerned about picking up the five-pound bag because I’d recently thrown out my shoulder and could barely pick up a letter without excruciating pain. Still, I needed sugar. But something about the bag looked wrong. It looked smaller. Since my eyesight is going and I had just ordered glasses, I assumed it was my vision that had the problems. When I picked up the bag, I felt no pain, surprising me. At first, I thought I’d miraculously healed in the three-block drive to the store. I thought I had somehow gotten stronger. More buff. The bag seemed much lighter than normal. And my entire hand fit around the bottom of the package. I checked the weight printed on the bottom of the bag and gasped. Then snarled. Four pounds. After a zillion freakin’ years of selling sugar in five-pound bags, they shaved off a pound and didn’t expect us to notice? Thieves! Charlatans! Again, you could spin this and say they were worried about the over-sugaring of America, but we know better. They are ripping us off!

I continued on my unmerry way to the cereal aisle, always good for a little blood boiling. The cereal aisle has been a thorn in my side for years. Cereal manufacturers been playing fast and loose with packaging, contents and prices since I can remember. I’ve watched the price of Cocoa Krispies go from about a buck a box in the late seventies to four bucks plus over the past couple years. Since I am addicted to Cocoa Krispies, I grit my teeth and pay their price. But this time when I picked up the box, it looked strange. Thinner and taller. Again, I attributed the change to my eyesight, but when I got home and put the box next to my nearly-empty Cocoa Krispies box, I couldn’t believe it. The new box was nearly a full inch thinner. For the same price. And because it’s so thin and tall, the box is super unstable and keeps falling over. So where the hell are they going to go from here? I’m sure they have a team of engineers working on this stability issue. “Bob? We need a cereal box the thickness of a National Geographic, but as tall as the previous box. And it needs to stand on its own. Maybe we ought to play around with weighted bottoms. You think the idiots will notice?” You know they must refer to their consumer base as morons and idiots because how else would they expect to pull this Houdini-disappearing-contents trick on us. Rotten jerks!

Last week, I was back at Safeway, picking up OJ for Frank. After taste-testing many brands years ago, Frank chose Tropicana. And only Tropicana. No other OJ will do. So I reached for the half-gallon container and happened to glance down at the contents labeling. 59 ounces. WHAT? I looked again. The label still said 59 ounces. I nearly screamed. Now not only did they think I was so stupid I didn’t know that there were 64 ounces in a half-gallon, but they stole five ounces of orange juice from me and I hadn’t even bought the carton yet! So I didn’t. I shoved the box back in the refrigerated display and searched for a brand that still sold me a half-gallon of juice. Of course, Frank was not happy with the Minute Maid and so now, every time I buy the stupid Tropicana Rip-off Juice, my blood-pressure rises so high, my eyeballs throb.

Where will this all end? What’s next? Five-packs of beer and soda? One stick of gum per package? A single, sad, lonely Cocoa Krispy taped to the bottom of a giant, paper-thin box?

And how will all this product-shaving effect our vernacular? Will we be saying things like: “Hey, check out that dude’s awesome five-pack abs.” “Honey, could you pick up 59 ounces of milk for me?”

I can see the future when product miniaturization hits the fast food industry. “Hey, can you super-shrink that order for me?” “Sure,” the pimply-faced order taker replies. “Would you like fry with that?”

©2011, Janet Periat

To achieve the American Dream, you must be successful. But our current definition of success is unattainable for most of us. Just when you think you have everything covered, the rates go up or you are fired or disqualified. Or you have a birthday. And then you become a “loser”. According to the current groupthink, the vast majority of us are losers.

To be considered successful, you must first and foremost make tons of cash. You must have a fantastic, exciting job. You must be CEO or at the very least, Senior VP. You must own a four-bedroom house, a family sedan, a motorcycle and/or a boat, and a two-seater sports car. You must decorate the house with new draperies and furnishings every two years. The house has to be kept spotless and smelling fresh, the latter hopefully through a little plug-in gizmo that spews artificial lemon verbena scent throughout your travertine tile-floored manse.

Your children must be stellar scholars, captains of the football team, chess champions and violin prodigies. You must have good health insurance, belong to a gym, and have a Bowflex in your heated garage. You must send your children to Ivy League schools. You must buy every new gadget on the market within 24 hours of its release. You must take expensive vacations and have a second home in the country—or at the very least, take cruises and own a timeshare in Tahoe or Hawaii.

For women there are a few extra things you need to be successful. Number One, you can’t age. Number Two, you must be a size one. You have to wear the absolute current fashion: nothing with more than a two-month shelf life. High heels are a must. Don’t forget the foundation, stylish make-up, perfectly coiffed and dyed hair, and polished fingernails. You must be tanned, gym-toned, get Botox injections and look perfect at all times. And don’t get caught driving the minivan. So embarrassing!

These out-of-reach goals are even more ridiculous considering that basic survival is hardly achievable anymore. My generation has been spending what’s left of their devastated 401Ks taking care of their elderly parents, putting their kids through college and trying to pay down an underwater mortgage. Health care is unaffordable for the majority. How the hell are we supposed to pay for the new roof or sewer line repairs or the dog’s hip operation?

But the worst component of the devastation of the middle class is that our culture considers us all failures. No matter how hard you worked, no matter if you went to graduate school, no matter if you followed all the rules, if you still came up short, you are a loser.

So where do we go from here? First, we need to realize that we are not losers. We’re experiencing a global shift in wealth distribution, and corporate greed on a scale that hasn’t been seen since the 1920s. The skyrocketing cost of health care is busting the budgets of the self-employed and making it too expensive for businesses to hire people over 50. Jobs are becoming obsolete at record pace. None of this is our fault. All of these factors are beyond our control. But how we deal with these changes is within our control. We need to become much more flexible in the ways we earn our living and how we spend our money. We need to save more. But more importantly, we need to redefine success.

We need to realize that society’s “markers of success” are made up, mostly by advertisers. And that the goals focus on the external. Whatever you do to your body will not bring you deep, lasting satisfaction. You will still age and therefore “fail”. That new Mercedes is used the moment you drive it off the lot. Spending hours of time distracting yourself with TV, smart phones and iPods will only make you feel more isolated. You actually must interact with people face-to-face to satisfy your basic, human need to connect with others. Two-word text messages do not promote bonding. They promote ADD.

Happiness comes from our interior lives, not our outside shell. Happiness comes from finding meaning in our lives. Beyond our basic survival, happiness can’t be bought.

The new definition of success should start with some questions: What will put food on my table and bring meaning to my life? Do I really need to own a house? What do I really need? What do I like? Not what you think you should like, but what you actually like. Work on widening your choices. Due to the current economic upheaval, you may need to change careers or move. Consider everything and everywhere that interests you, no matter what anyone else thinks. Stretch. Try something you never thought you could do. And if you’re broke, don’t be too picky. Do what it takes to survive and forget how you look. People who think lesser of you because you took a food server job after you lost your corporate position aren’t your friends. Besides, you never know where any job will lead. You never know where your next opportunity may come from.

Palliative care specialist Bronnie Ware interviewed many people on their deathbeds. She asked them what their regrets were. The number one response? I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

When you’re dying and reviewing your life, what will you be thinking? Will you be proud of your McMansion, Gucci slippers and plasma screen TV? Or the hours you spent in a tanning bed? Or the years you spent staring at the tiny screen on your smart phone instead of experiencing the world around you?

The American Dream has been co-opted by our corporate-profit-driven culture and has become the American Nightmare. We deserve better. Our dreams should emphasize emotional fulfillment, not isolate us and make us feel like failures.

©2011, Janet Periat

When I take my daily walks, two smells are more prevalent than any. Fresh cut grass, you guess? No. Roses? Fresh air?  No and no. The two things that permeate the atmosphere in San Mateo? Bounce and car exhaust. I much prefer the latter.

We live in a Bounce-scented world. My friends smell like Bounce, their houses smell like Bounce, their animals smell like Bounce and their children smell like Bounce. Bounce is now the ubiquitous odor of modern society. Everywhere I go, all I smell is Bounce.

Several years back, Frank banished Bounce from our house. Citing early smell aversion therapy—Frank worked in a candle factory in college—he cannot tolerate heavy manufactured scents. When we got together, I was pretty enamored of Bounce. The product was rather recent at the time—carbon dating puts that somewhere between the Paleolithic Age and the Bronze Age—and I thought it was a nifty idea. No more gummed up fabric softener reservoirs in the washing machine, simply throw a little snippet of fabric in the dryer and voila! Soft, unwrinkled, great-smelling clothes. Frank, however, hated the smell of Bounce and pointed out that when using an entire sheet of the product, it coated our towels with a chemical that repelled water. Which isn’t exactly helpful when trying to dry off after a shower. So he started using half-sheets of Bounce and all was well.

Then came the day Frank refused to throw that half-sheet in the dryer. He’d finally had it. He didn’t want to smell like Bounce, he didn’t want the house smelling like Bounce, nor his towel. So he stopped using the product. I didn’t notice at first. By the time I did, I no longer cared. My towels worked better and the laundry detergent took out the bad smells, so who needed the damn fabric softener, anyway?

However, as we began to notice, everyone else we knew continued to use the product. But at that point, we didn’t care. We lived in a forest with very few neighbors. Smoke from wood stoves was the smell scourge of that neighborhood.

Five years ago, we moved to San Mateo and were inundated by all new smells. Car exhaust, mowed lawns, diesel fumes from El Camino Real, along with the sweet smells of my backyard: roses, orange blossoms and the piney scent of our redwood tree. When the wind shifts, we are attacked by McDonald’s fryer. Mmmm, filet-o-fish sandwiches and fries. When the wind goes the other way, the pizza place and Chinese restaurant compete for our attention. Sometimes the corner doughnut shop smells like it’s in our living room. But mostly what we notice is the smell of Bounce. All our neighbors use it. All one hundred thousand of them.

I can’t help but mourn the loss of non-man-made scents. The prevalent odors in modern society today are manufactured. Retailers use specially designed scents to attract shoppers. Hotels scent their lobbies. Public restrooms are cherry-smelling nightmares. Turn on the tube and Glade wants you to plug some gizmo into your electrical outlet that lets off timed bursts of “fresh scents.” Gak. When I was a kid, “air fresheners” came in a can and were used exclusively in the bathroom. And I have to say, even as a kid, I preferred the smell of crap over artificial rosy-smelling crap. “Air fresheners” don’t freshen the air. They pollute it with manufactured nastiness.

I grew up in San Mateo, and thankfully, the air is less polluted than when I was a kid. I no longer smell the scent of fresh DDT in the air—which also used to be ubiquitous—nor is the car exhaust anywhere near as toxic nor prevalent. I am reminded of this every time a classic car drives by and leaves me in a cloud of unburned gasoline and oil. But there has been a huge uptick in Bounce and other artificial smells. And I hate them all.

My hatred of Bounce came to a head this week when I received two shipments of pre-owned pants I bought off of eBay. When I opened the first package, a nuclear-powered blast of Bounce annihilated me. The lady must have used a whole freakin’ roll in the dryer. Instead of buying pants, I ended up with two large pants-shaped Bounce air fresheners. I swear, if I put these two pairs of pants into a packed gymnasium of sweaty basketball players, no one would smell anything but Bounce.

My nostrils stinging, I immediately put the pants in the wash. When I withdrew them, there was almost no change in the smell. Since the pants are brightly colored, I can’t risk washing them too much or the design will fade. So I hung them up in my bathroom to dry. Now my entire house smells like Bounce. The smell pervades everything. It has wafted into the kitchen, the back bedroom and Frank’s office. When I walk in the door, a wall of Bounce hits me. Sitting here at my desk, all I can smell is Bounce.

Disgusted, I looked forward to my second package of pants because surely these would not smell as horrible as the first two pairs. Wrong. When I opened the package, yet another typhoon of Bounce-filled air stormed my nose. And stayed there. I think Bounce has sticky molecules that are designed to adhere to human nostril hair. Because no matter what I fix for dinner—fish, chicken in peanut sauce or grilled steak—all I can smell is Bounce. I’m thinking of having nose hair replacement therapy.

Last time I wrote about a product that annoyed me and used the actual name, the manufacturer sent a team of lawyers after me. If the Bounce people are as aggressive as the odor of their product, this time I’m expecting a team of contract killers. But I’ll be ready for them. Because their scent will surely hit me before their bullets do.

©2010, Janet Periat