I write today from the Radnor Hotel in St. Davids, Pennsylvania, site this weekend of the National Steering Committee for "Project Kaleidoscope," to which the Wife and I, despite our charter membership in
the Brewster Society, could not wangle invitations. But this snubbing will be the subject of another complaint.
Today's complaint concerns Auntie Anne's (which, incidentally, the Wife chooses to pronounce "AHN-tie Anne" — as is the practice in her bed---led state of origin — and as many times as she articulates the name, I am moved to declare, "AHA! But if 'Auntie' were intended to be so pronounced, the company's play on words would fail." To which in turn the Wife replies, "Exactly," leaving me without recourse except in defense of that unconscionably obvious play on words.) —
and specifically, the tendency of the Auntie Anne's airline-terminal franchises to be invariably out of pretzels. This is not in itself damning — as many, if not most, retail outlets are equally deficient in pretzels — but one must also consider that Auntie Anne's takes great pains to put itself forth to the community as a specialty vendor of pretzels, going so far, in fact, as to install an unmistakable pretzel graphic in its very
corporate logo.
I have ascertained from the counter clerk that the Auntie Anne's airport
m.o. is to prepare the pretzels at some centralized location off-site, then transport them to the several satellite outposts located strategically in the various concourses.
"The failure, it seems to me then, is in the delivery of these pretzels to these outposts."
"But take heart, kind sir," says the vendor, gesturing at two transparent plastic vats of churning liquid — one bright red, and the other wearing a distinctly lemonade-ish off-white hue — "we have plenty of beverage offerings." As I watch the liquids in these aquaria continue to bubble, agitated by some hidden motor capable of a great many applications short of making pretzels, I wonder what undesirable fate would attend these beverages if they were left to settle.
It does not seem intuitive that the sight of a corporate logo fraught with pretzels would trigger a craving for, say, fruit punch. That said, I can't imagine how a graphic designer might render a reel-in image of fruit punch
per se — perhaps a rectangle, its bottom half red, to signify the half-full aquarium, with the characteristic stubby double-lines drawn around it to indicate the churning movement. Certainly uninspiring, and given these facts, I can draw one of two conclusions as to what Auntie Anne's means to achieve with its pretense to marketing pretzels in airports:
(1) Auntie Anne's is in fact marketing the fruit punch, and the pretzels are in place as a sly ruse, a siren song to draw in the unwary who would buy pretzels. Once at the counter, the trap springs — no pretzels! — and the clerk peddles the fruit punch that was the intended object of sale from the get-go. This strategy would comport with business sense, if, for example, one could demonstrate that the demand for pretzels correlated substantially with demand for fruit punch but that the cost of making the pretzels is substantially greater. Close observation of the commodities markets — which finds the price of pretzel dough at its five-year peak in late Februrary of this year — seems to bear out some part of this hypothesis.
(2) The Auntie Anne's franchises in airports are not in themselves franchises but cleverly devised three-dimensional billboards — close enough to the genuine article to muster up a real hankering for a soft cinnamon-sugar pretzel, but not real enough to satisfy that craving (it remains an open question whether the fruit punch, which no one has ever tried to buy, is real or fake). Thus does Auntie Anne's Corp., through a subtle but ingenious deployment of tantalization, exalt an otherwise mundane product offering, the soft pretzel, to the stuff of legend.
"Leave 'em wanting more," you say? We'll go you one better and leave 'em wanting anything at all!
