The wheaty taste of niche gone nuts

Wheat ThinsWe have so many choices, yet so few of them are really important.

But that doesn’t stop the marketers from giving us more to choose from. We live in an age of niche marketing gone nuts. There’s actually a $47 marketing book that people presumably pay for, called “Niche Marketing on Crack!” I’m not kidding. Look it up. That’s how insane it’s gotten.

There’s a desperate battle going on for shelf space and brain space, space on your bookshelf and space on your DVR. Just the other day I went shopping and looked for Wheat Thins. Remember Wheat Thins? Square, thin, made out of wheat. They used to be pretty simple. Not any more.

They still have the original Wheat Thins, but there’s also a reduced fat kind; there’s one with a “hint of salt,” then you have the fiber selects type in garden vegetable or 5-grain; the big size, which are the same as the original only bigger; the multi-grain kind, not to be confused with the 100 whole grain type; the sundried tomato and basil flavor, not to be confused with the parmesan basil flavor; not to mention the cream cheese and chives, the ranch flavor, the reduced fat roasted garlic and herb flavor, the reduced fat country French onion, and the new artisan cheese Wheat Thins, in white cheddar or colby flavors.

I’m not kidding. There are also the toasted Wheat Thins chips, which come in a few more flavors, but in bags, rather than boxes. Plus they have all these flavors of Wheat Thins in at least three different sized boxes, plus the 100-calorie packs and the slightly larger lunch packs, and that’s not even counting the ginormous boxes of Wheat Thins you can buy at Costco.

You can see how this all gets to be exhausting.

I took my son to Barnes and Noble and Chaucer’s yesterday because he had gift certificates for both. The Maximum Ride book he wanted was available in hardcover or paperback, which we expected, but also a larger trade paperback which had a nicer cover and cost a dollar more, so he had to decide about that. But even though the book said it was number one in the series, we later found out from his friend that it was number one in A SERIES but not number one in THE SERIES that he wanted because there were two other series he was supposed to read first. So, of course, he wanted to go back and get those.

And because it was reading, and I like to encourage that, I took him back to the store. By this time I was ready for some escapist reading of my own, but trying to browse a bookstore for plain old fiction is just about impossible these days. Did I want literature, romance, mystery, best sellers or book club favorites? What about women’s fiction or an Oprah’s selection? By the time we got out of there my brain was too fried to curl up with anything other than a nice stiff gin and tonic, because there was no way I could possibly decide which bottle of wine I was going to open at that point.

Then I flipped through the cable music channels trying to find some music to listen to. Can someone please explain the difference between adult alternative rock and adult album alternative?

When I was a kid, everyone watched The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family because there was nothing else even remotely appropriate for us to watch on TV at night. Now we have so many cable stations I can’t keep them straight. Forget channel surfing, I need GPS on my TV.

I couldn’t figure out which music I wanted, but then I stumbled on the Food Network’s Home Shopping Channel.

Guess what they were featuring? Wheat Thins.

When Leslie’s not being bewildered by “Marketing on Crack!” she’s usually on her computer, at Leslie@LeslieDinaberg.com. Originally published on April 24, 2009 in the the Santa Barbara Daily Sound. For more columns visit LeslieDinaberg.com.