morning hymn

Did you know that only Alpen(tm?) Muesli has three royal warrants? That's fine and it is nice to know that one can eat on the same standards as the Queen or the Prince of Wales even at 9:30 in the morning but one thing kind of took me aback. The third royal warrant says: "BY APPOINTMENT TO HER MAJESTY H. M. QUEEN ELIZABETH, THE QUEEN MOTHER: MANUFACTURERS OF BREAKFAST CEREALS, WEETABIX LIMITED, BURTON LATIMER." (no tm). Well what's kind of creepy is that this could be read as Alpen advocating their product as sustenance suitable for corpses. With all due respect to WEETABIX LIMITED, BURTON LATIMER, but shouldn't you take the royal warrant off the product one the royal is dead? If you don't, the customer is likely to think they're food is pretty old - whether it means they've had the cereal in their kitchen since before she died, OR that it means it was a lot older than you'd like to have thought, when you bought it. The cereal is not even particularly good, so they are in danger of giving the impression that they're not marketing they're product to whomever will like it, but instead to whomever will eat. As you can imagine this leaves gaping open the possibility of diluting the royal warrant and it's significance. If you will bear with me, maybe you can understand what I mean. If royal warrants can be given by dead people, what's to stop them from being given by non-royals or indeed people who don't exist at all? As a case in point let us imagine there is in America a gourmet soup company. The director of marketing sees underperformance by a luxury mixed vegetable soup of theirs, which he believes is capable of being a lot more powerful in the soup sector and on the shelves, if only people would buy it. It may happen that one day companies such as this one would give in and label the product with a "Terry Schiavo Official Warrant" to make the product more appealing. This just deludes the customer thinking they are getting a celebrity quality product, when they are really getting the actual celebrity, blended and in a can. The problem with fame, celebrity and indeed breakfast cereal is that their only common and potentially humanising attributes let us slip so easily into a place where we prefer to exploit people the only time and place we're in a position to help them. No?