Grumpy chocolates

The New Zealand Herald adores presenting the views of what I call the Grumpy Brigade, people who are perpetually angry with the government, local or national, when that government isn’t being run by right wingers like themselves. It’s tempting to call such people “right whingers”, but I’ll stick with Grumpy Brigade.

The usual tactic is to use overly emotive language, blatant appeals to sentimentality and the abandonment of reason by suggesting the absence of it among the Brigader’s target. Their irrationality is laughable to reasonable people, but to fence-sitters their words can resonate, especially when repeated over and over again.

An example: The Herald’s Thursday “Sideswipe” column contained an item about a promotion by Cadbury in which three sales reps dressed in costume were planning on passing out free chocolates in Auckland’s Aotea Square up to a week earlier. Before they could begin, apparently, they were supposedly approached by a “security guard” who told them, according to the column, that “they had to leave, as handing out free items without a permit incurs an instant fine.”

The Grumpy Brigader wrote, “they were not handing out anything promotional, nor had anything with the Cadbury logo; they simply had eggs for passing punters.” Oh really? So they took the Cadbury chocolates out of the wrappers and placed them in plane wrappers, did they? And the chocolates all had the Cadbury logo rubbed out, did they?

No company does something like that without expecting a return, even if it’s just goodwill from the public, and they would never do it without some way for the public to know who was behind it. So, there had to be logos somewhere—such as on the wrappers, on the chocolates themselves.

But the issue here is—if the story is true as told—how lame and stupid was it for Cadbury to attempt the stunt without first checking the rules? A simple phone call to Auckland City Council would’ve told them the rules they needed to comply with. They don’t get a free pass just because they were passing out free Cadbury chocolates nor just because Easter was approaching perhaps ten days later (the item is vague about when it happened). So when the Grumpy Brigader asked, “Is this the Easter spirit of Auckland?” the answer is, Easter had nothing to do with it.

I have no problem with Cadbury passing out free chocolates. However, just like every other business they have an obligation to follow the rules. The problem I have is with people who try and tear down a city or government because they don’t like a particular result, people who feel the rules shouldn’t apply to them or their pet project. And, I have a real problem with a newspaper that seems to think that promoting the gripes of the Grumpy Brigade without context or refutation is okay. It never is.