Whenever I go grocery shopping, I always examine the packaging of any food I consider purchasing, and I specifically look for the information that is written in the fine print. I expect sellers to lie and to attempt to cheat me. Personally, I don’t care about counting calories (I am perfectly happy with my weight). Instead, I am looking at the ingredient lists. Once you start to examine the ingredient list of every food you contemplate purchasing, you will notice a certain interesting trend, namely, people who make food want to rip you off.
Cherry syrup in a grocery store.
Here is an example: A bottle of cherry syrup on a shelf in the grocery store. The label says “cherry syrup,” so you probably imagine that it is made from cherries, right? Let’s take a look at the ingredient list. Unfortunately, this time the ingredient list is provided only in Estonian, Lithuanian, and Latvian (no English), so you have no choice but to trust my translation. (Unless, of course, you speak one of these languages, in which case: Cool! Greetings to another fellow polyglot!)
Ingredient list of the “cherry” syrup.
In the fine print, this product is called “cherry taste syrup.” Ingredients are: “Drinking water, sugar, glucose-fructose syrup, citric acid, aspartame, flavoring, sodium benzoate, food colorings: E150d, E102, E122, E151, stabilizers: E414, E415.” Here is a crop of the fine print, so that you can more easily check it for yourself.
Crop of the ingredient list.
Looking at the ingredient list, you will notice something interesting: THERE ARE NO CHERRIES. Usually people who try to rip me off will add 1% of cherries to the food. This time, they didn’t even bother with adding a trace amount of cherries.
This ought to be illegal. This is a fraudulent attempt to mislead the consumer. Most shoppers aren’t as pedantic as I am, they just grab some product from the shelf and buy it without even bothering to check the fine print.
Why does this matter? Some food ingredients are expensive (like real cherries). Other food ingredients are much cheaper (like water, sugar, and artificial flavors). The consumer is incorrectly imagining that they are purchasing a quality product made from expensive ingredients. Instead they get a product where better ingredients are substituted with cheap crap. Thus the manufacturer can profit by pocketing the difference.
This time you will notice that the fake cherry syrup costs only 0.99 euro for half a liter. That’s actually pretty cheap. Real cherry syrup would be more expensive. But you cannot even imagine on how many occasions I have spotted fake products being sold for almost the same price as the real ones. That’s a rip off.
Moreover, due to the incorrect labeling (both fake and real cherry syrup can be labeled as “cherry syrup”; producers of the fake product aren’t legally obliged to call it “cherry taste syrup” or something similar instead), it becomes really hard for businesses who make genuine products to compete against all the fraudsters. Thus everybody is motivated to substitute quality ingredients for the cheap crap in order to stay in the business.
Nowadays, this race to the bottom has come to the point where most of the desserts are just palm oil with sugar in it. Just add appropriate artificial flavors, food colorings, preservatives, stabilizers, thickeners, etc., and the crappy product is ready for sale.
I love ice cream. It’s my favorite dessert. For a few years, before the 2008 economic crisis, I couldn’t find any ice cream in Latvian grocery stores that I could eat. Every single one of them was made from vegetable oil instead of milk. Personally, I refuse to pay money for such crap on principle. It was only after the economic crisis that some manufacturers realized how there is a market for “luxury ice-cream” that was, gasp, actually made from milk and real cream. Nowadays, I know three different Latvian ice cream manufacturers who produce edible ice cream. (Of course, the number of manufacturers, who make their ice cream from vegetable oil, is larger.) Anyway, during the 2008 crisis, some brands realized that they cannot compete in the race for the cheapest product, so they decided to return back to making products that are actually edible.
Another example—wafers and biscuits. I used to eat wafers in the past, back when the recipes were at least decent. About two years ago, the only Latvian company that was still making edible wafers changed their recipe. I haven’t been able to eat any wafers for a few years already. I checked the ingredient lists of various wafers I saw in grocery stores, and I disliked everything I saw there. I was forced to give up cookies/biscuits years ago. I used to eat cookies back when I was still a child. Nowadays, their ingredient lists are just awful.
Some of you might be thinking that my complaints are unjustified, after all, palm oil is edible. Maybe you even feel that palm oil desserts are tasty. The problem is that I can tell the difference. An ice cream that is made from milk and cream tastes differently than one made from vegetable oils.
Alternatively, let’s consider desserts made from fruits and berries. I love eating fresh bananas. I also really love all the desserts my mother makes from bananas. But I absolutely hate the artificial banana flavoring. It smells nothing like real bananas. The so called banana flavoring smells like cheap bubble gum, it’s one of the most disgusting scents in existence. Two years ago, I once bought dehydrated banana chips. Upon opening the package, I immediately noticed the disgusting stench of artificial banana flavoring. I checked the ingredient list on the package. It stated: bananas, preservative, flavoring. On that day I realized that I cannot even buy dried fruit without first checking the ingredient list on the package. Why? Just why? Why did the manufacturer had to ruin perfectly good bananas by adding this abominable flavoring to them? Nowadays, some people feel that real bananas no longer smell like bananas. Thus they add an artificial flavoring to the real product in order to change its smell to how some people imagine a dehydrated banana ought to smell.
Artificial banana flavoring is one I absolutely loathe. In my opinion, the rest of fruit/berry flavorings aren’t as abominable, but I can still tell the difference between a fake fruit smell versus the real one. I can tell whether a strawberry cake was made with real strawberries or whether it has the artificial flavoring instead. The smell of real fruits and berries is usually very subtle. All the artificial flavors are very strong in comparison. I assume that it would be possible to add a smaller amount of artificial flavor so that I would no longer notice the unusually strong scent (compared to natural products), but somehow no food manufacturers want to do this. Personally, I strongly prefer the much subtler scents of real fruit and berries. The overwhelmingly powerful flavorings feel fake to me.
To conclude: consumers are getting ripped off on a daily basis. The only solution would be for each one of us (or at least many of us) to start to painstakingly read and decipher all the fine print on food packaging. Until that happens, food corporations will keep on producing junk with the expectation that consumers do not care and cannot tell the difference. Personally, I also try to get my food from the farmers’ market whenever possible. There I can find tasty handmade food that’s created with normal ingredient lists, like, you know, a cherry syrup that contains only cherries and sugar (I do want my cherry syrup to be made from real cherries).
In the US market, a lot of companies sell things that are sweetened with “grape juice.”
The “grape juice” is a fig-leaf – they buy giant tanker train-cars full of the stuff and it’s transported “dehydrated” into syrup form. In other words, it’s mostly sugar. The purchaser, who uses it in ‘healthy’ drinks because ‘no sugar added’ is “trusting” the supplier of the “grape juice” that it’s actually got the slightest thing to do with grapes. Of course it generally does not: the train-car tank is full of corn syrup, water, and maybe someone drank some grape juice and micturated the outcome into the tank car so there’d be some grape product in it. I have not yet seen something billed as “.000000% grape juice” or “homeopathic grape drink” but apparently if you’re a marketing asshole all you need is the probability that there are some molecules in there that, at some time or other, were in a grape.
These labels are in violation of Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 of the European Parliament and of the council of 25 October 2011.
ANEX IV, Part A, article 4:
In the case of foods in which a component or ingredient that consumers expect to be normally used or naturally
present has been substituted with a different component or ingredient, the labelling shall bear — in addition to the list
of ingredients — a clear indication of the component or the ingredient that has been used for the partial or whole
substitution: (a) in close proximity to the name of the product; and (b) using a font size which has an x-height of at least 75 % of the x-height of the name of the product and which is not smaller than the minimum font size required in Article 13(2) of this Regulation.
EU consumers are fairly well protected with regulation. Upholding it is another story it seems.
re ice cream: For years, one of my favorite ice cream brands was “all natural” with an impressive list of about three ingredients. Then, something happened, and the company began labeling many of their products “frozen dairy dessert” instead of “ice cream”. The ingredient list exploded. The difference was very obvious to me, and I stopped buying that brand.
So true! And same trend is seen here in the US. I’m almost reduced to buying nothing except raw ingredients, and even on those can be adulterated.
I also object to the inability to even find real fruits and vegetables, as in, varieties that weren’t bred only for shelf life. *All* of the tomatoes, strawberries, Concord grapes, and more, that are available for purchase in stores here taste like wood. No wonder children grow up not liking produce, since it’s becoming close to tasteless.
I don’t want fake food, whether packaged or fresh.
That business of tasting the differences causes me problems too, I can taste the most commonly used sweeteners, they leave a nasty after taste in my mouth, and they are added to all sorts of things, but particularly squashes/syrups. How can Robisons Traditional Lemon Barley Water a recipe that goes back several centuries have artificial sweeteners in? Fortunatelly most of the big supermarkets here have realised that there are people who don’t like sweeteners so they make most of their posh squashes in sugar and sugar free versions so people can choose. There are also some posh brands that make not using artifical anthing a selling point. Also I think our legislation must be different from yours as you couldn’t sell something with no cherry in as ‘cherry’ it would have to be ‘cherry flavoured’. And I’m with you on how foul fake banana flavour is, quite disgusting.
It would be illegal in the UK. It would have to (in the big label) be “Cherry Flavour Syrup”.
Many years ago (1981/2), a company in the UK got into trouble for selling “Hedgehog Flavoured Crisps”. As the crips had no hedgehog in them, the company was required to change the branding to be “Hedgehog Flavour Crisps”.
This is almost certainly not actually legal in the EU.
djudge @#2
That’s interesting. I took these photos last week in a Latvian grocery store. By the way, “vyšnių sirupas” means “cherry syrup” in Lithuanian; this product is made in Lithuania. This means that people who are producing this product must be breaking the law.
garnetstar @#4
Yeah, that’s a good strategy for a person who likes to cook. Unfortunately, I am not such a person. I do eat lots of raw food. I can eat some raw vegetables and call that a dinner.
I so totally agree. At home, I have a book, which is basically a catalogue of most of the apple cultivars that can be grown in Latvian climate. There are several hundred apple cultivars in that book. In a grocery store, you probably only see maybe two apple cultivars for sale. Both of them always taste like crap.
This https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Korobovka_(apple) is my personal favorite apple cultivar. Their taste is absolutely amazing, they are really sweet, juicy, and crunchy. Unfortunately, these apples are tiny and not particularly pretty. Thus no supermarket would ever sell them.
Of course, my favorite strawberry, pear, plum, cherry, etc. cultivars are also totally unsuited for supermarkets that prioritize shelf life and good visual appearance over the taste.
Personally, I get all my fruits, berries, and vegetables in the farmers’ market. There it is possible to find the good stuff (assuming that the consumer knows what to look for). I get my apples from a farmer who grows about 20 different apple cultivars (he has all my favorites, so I’m happy).
Jazzlet @#5
I avoid most artificial sweeteners, especially aspartame and saccharin, because I have no good reason to use them. So far my body seems to deal with sugar well enough, hence I’m happy to eat sugar.
As for taste, I suspect that some sweeteners probably ought to be better than others. Recently, I bought some sea buckthorn berry juice with stevia as the sweetener, and it tasted OK.
Marcus @#1
That’s interesting. I don’t think I have ever seen in Latvian stores anything that was supposedly sweetened with grape juice or anything similar. Here people usually just use sugar and that’s it. Or they use artificial sweeteners like aspartame.
The whole idea seems weird for me. It’s irrelevant whether you extract sugars from grapes or from whatever other plant, it’s all still either one of the monosaccharides or disaccharides. It’s not like some sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates were better than others, at least for most people. Besides, even for people who do have specific preferences, it shouldn’t matter from which plant their sugars are extracted.
Marcus @1: There is also the trick of using concentrate from several different fruit juices so that no individual source of sugar is the top ingredient by weight.
Andreas, I recall you taking a much more “buyer-beware” attitude toward contents of video games (specifically, gambling mechanics) when those games are marketed toward children and parents are pressured to buy those games for their children without knowing about the contents.
I wonder if you would consider revising your previous attitude. I agree that deliberately misleading advertising is harmful both to the consumer and to those who make products that are not designed to mislead. It seems to me that a video game that is marketed toward children is deliberately deceiving the purchaser by including mechanics in it that are not suitable for children.
I think I heard someplace that artificial banana flavor is based on some older cultivar/breed of bananas that no longer exist. Not sure how much truth their is to that.
Slightly related, I’ve also heard that orange juice looses it’s flavor in less than a day, so all the packaged/frozen orange juices contain natural juice and artificial flavorings.
I’m not terribly picky about my foods, mostly I dislike artificial sweeteners. I do check toothpaste ingredients, as it’s really difficult to find toothpaste without silica.
invivoMark @#11
I do not, in principle, oppose regulations about games, given how they would be beneficial. And, of course, games should, at the very least, include prominently visible warnings about how there are in-game microtransactions. I wouldn’t necessary be against a complete ban on some kinds of microtransactions either.
I only disapprove the attitude some consumers have, who claim that poor decisions are never their fault and that they ought to be entitled to protection, some technological fix that would magically guarantee that they can make no mistakes. Moreover, banks already offer users various protection tools, like for example, automated text messages every time money is withdrawn from the bank account. Computers and gaming consoles already offer parental control tools. If some person stubbornly refuses to use existing protection mechanisms and still complains that they want a guarantee that nothing will go wrong, then that’s irresponsible behavior.
To extend the analogy. If some person bought a product that was clearly labelled as “cherry taste syrup” and afterwards complained, “How could I have possibly known that there exist products with the word ‘cherry’ on the label that aren’t actually made from cherries,” then that would be an unreasonable attitude. I do think that consumers should be expected to learn that there is a difference between “a cherry syrup” and a “cherry taste syrup.” As long as consumers are warned and some corporation doesn’t try to hide negative facts about some product, they should be allowed to make poor quality inferior goods. Besides, there probably exist people who are perfectly happy to buy a substitute product instead of the real one. Maybe somebody is allergic to real cherries but likes the taste. And I guess vegans would be happy to eat “ice cream” made from vegetable oils instead of milk.
Many countries have laws on packaging. Generally speaking, juice only be labeled as juice if it’s pure juice or made from concentrate. Anything that is labelled “fruit drink”, “fruit nectar”, “punch”, “organgeade” or other such term is mostly sugar water. That “cherry syrup” never claimed to be made from cherries, so it’s probably legal to sell it as such. It’s deceptive and dishonest, but it’s within the poorly written law.
Similar to ice cream, another product that gets made with fake ingredients is chocolate, and I’m not just talking about that american crap made with vegetable oil (re: hershey’s). Many are labelled as “chocolate flavour” which means a lot of fake ingredients and chemicals. It has the texture of paste and glue. Most “advent calendars” sold in December are made with it.
Years ago in Canada, there was a table syrup sold in a Canadian supermarket chain. It wasn’t maple syrup, because the real thing can be expensive. It was concentrated fruit juices (apple, pear, others) which made it edible to taste. It was a lot better than the corn syrup crap you get in a lot of products (e.g. US sodas). Tom Scott did a video on fake malt vinegar in England and how no one cares because it doesn’t cause harm or affect anything.
I’m fortunate to have Carrefour stores all over Taiwan and other local chains that sell imports or products partly marked in other languages. One sells a lot of Auchan products. I can read a fair amount of French and can muddle my way though an ingredient list in Dutch, German, Spanish, or Italian. My main concern is how much soy gets put into things; I have an intolerance that causes vomiting. (My secondary concern is how they stick the Chinese language labels on packages. If it’s a small container like a single can, I understand covering up the foreign language. But on a box with a surface area at least a half square metre and plenty of white space, WHY do they cover the English or European languages?)
Intransitive @#14
I used to like drinking fruit juices back when they were still available in Latvian shops. Nowadays, there are nectars only (with only a few exceptions). I don’t buy those, given how I have no interest in paying for sugary water. After all, I can make some sugary drink on my own at home, I have plenty of very cheap tap water there, I can also buy sugar cheaply in bulk.
Surprisingly, chocolate is still pretty good in Latvia, it’s one of those few snacks that I can still buy. Sure, there are brands that make “chocolate” from vegetable oil and weird ingredients, but there are also several brands that still make good chocolate.
Now this seriously sucks, especially given how soy gets added to pretty much everything. I am super lucky to have no food allargies.
They do this in Latvian shops too. For imported stuff, the ingredient list in foreign languages will be covered up with a sticker in which there is a poorly done Latvian translation. Being a polyglot, I’d much rather read the original in some other language than have to deal with some weird Latvian translation that is only semi-comprehensible.
Yeah, about the video game thing (and keep in mind I am an avid gamer)…
I just recently found out that my child’s elementary school has given her access to a game called “Prodigy”, marketed as a fun math game for kids. Apparently it is really fun (pokemon rip off), and she loves it and can’t stop talking about it. She came home asking about downloading it on the computer here which sounded fine… till I looked into it and discovered that there is a $60 (U.S.) paid yearly subscription to have access to what I would consider basic content in the game, and it is constantly sending her messages about becoming a paid member and dangling things in front of her that she could only access as a member.
My child is 7. I was not asked if it was alright with me that she be exposed to predatory marketing – I have actually been extremely careful to keep her away from that crap in the games she plays. Her school did this without my knowledge or consent in part because I doubt they even understand the nature of the tech their trying to “teach” with.
You can go look at reviews of this game, many of them written by children of various ages, on sites like Common Sense Media and immediately see that we have a problem here. Hell yes we need regulation – these companies are actively targeting the most susceptible among us at our expense to turn a profit.
About Prodigy:
https://onezero.medium.com/the-ethically-questionable-math-game-taking-over-u-s-schools-627882248bc3
About predatory monetization in video games (content warning for strong language)
Like Andreas, I am a compulsive label reader. Mostly because my mum taught me to cook from fresh ingredients and how to spot filler ingredients on labels.
Imagine my horror that the ‘luxury’ bread from this country’s largest retail chain’s house brand (which is targeted as a high-quality brand) is full of filler, like bean flour, and artifically coloured by adding malt to it.
Or the frankfurter sausges from Unilever’s #1 brand here: about 40% pork meat, all the rest is filler and flavourings.
And then the surprise to find that the bulk articles at Aldi are mostly exactly what you expect: frankfurters with 85% pork meat, tonic water that really is nothing but carbonated water with quinine.
My experience is that (aside from horrible cheap examples like Andreas’ cherry-flavoured stuff) bulk articles from low-cost discounters like Lidl and Aldi can be trusted to be just what they say they are, the expensive branded stuff is often more filler and artificial flavourings that people expect the real taste to be because: “It’s branded, it must be the good stuff”.
silverfeather @#16
The teacher clearly did something very unethical.
By the way, I think that trying to explain how marketing works to your child could work better than keeping them away from advertisements. Of course, it depends on how old the child is, so it cannot always work. Anyway, here’s a story from my life.
Marketing that tries to squeeze money out of school children is nothing new. I am 27 now. Back when I was 8 years old, there was a Latvian brand of milk drinks marketed at children. These drinks were sold in 200 milliliter packages with cartoon drawings. They came in various weird tastes, with all kinds of flavorings and food colorings. This is how the packaging looks like:
Anyway, back when I was 8 years old, the company that produces this crap came up with an idea how school teachers could help them earn more cash. A class of schoolchildren were to collect a large amount of empty drink packages, then use them to create some sculpture. One lucky winner would get some prize.
My school teacher decided that my class should participate in this lottery. For two months in a row she coerced me and all my classmates to purchase this shitty drink as often as possible so as to get more empty packages for the contest.
My teacher managed to squeeze exactly zero packages from me. But her coercion did piss me off. My mother explained to me that for the same amount of money we could buy either a liter of real milk or one 200 milliliter package of this artificial milk drink. Back then I liked the taste of real milk (and various desserts that my mother made for me from milk), hence I decided that I won’t even consider participating in this shitty lottery. My mother explained to me how these milk drinks were rip offs, and at that age I could already understand the problem.
By the way, my class didn’t win anything in that damn lottery, even though my classmates dutifully collected empty packages for several months.
mvdwege @#17
In Latvia there is a luxury brand of various baked goods (bread, cookies, cakes). Their bread and cookies are fine (not really better than other brands, though). Their cakes, however, were a huge disappointment. They are pretty much the most expensive cakes you can find in the average Latvian grocery store. And the cream they use for said cakes isn’t made from milk, it’s all vegetable oil. There are various other Latvian brands that produce much cheaper cakes from actual milk and quality ingredients.
I never eat any sausages. I used to eat them 20 years ago, but nowadays the recipes have spiraled downhill too much.
I used to live in Germany, there I bought my groceries from Aldi and Lidl. The more expensive stores didn’t offer better foods, they just charged more for the same stuff. It’s possibly to buy poor quality food in every store. Similarly, as long as you know what to look for on the ingredient list, it is also possible to find edible things pretty much everywhere. Of course, sometimes it means buying simple ingredients and cooking for yourself.
More often than not, luxury food means simply one that is packaged in fancy and excessive packaging, neither the food, nor the ingredients being any better.
Andreas Avester @#18
It isn’t just one teacher, it’s multiple U.S. school districts. This game is going nationwide and being pushed through our schools, and imo it’s just one more symptom of our broken system.
Other than that, I’m generally in agreement that marketing trying to squeeze money out of schoolchildren isn’t new and has always been contemptible (as your example was), but it does seem to me to be increasing in psychological intensity and becoming even more institutionally normalized.
I’m also generally in agreement that teaching children about marketing is better than just trying to shield them from it forever, and I have been doing that (age is a factor). I just don’t think that it benefits kids in any way to be immersed in manipulative marketing schemes to be taught about the dangers of them. Even though I can and am using this as a teaching moment, that doesn’t stop the bile from rising in the back of my throat that we as a people seem to think this is all just fine.
The laws need to be brought up to speed with the psychological sophistication of the tech. And I guess we’d also have to decide that at the bare minimum kids were worth protecting from the worst of it, never mind the rest of us.
They don’t seem to push Prodigy in the UK. The schools have subscriptions to some games: Spelling Shed and Maths Shed for Juniors (that’s years 3-6, or 7 to 11 year olds), Purple Mash for Infants (years R, 1 and 2, or 4 to 7 y.o.). They give children logins to use at home. There is no push to buy anything (the school already pays), and the games have a teacher’s interface where they can see what the children do, and choose the type and difficulty of the exercises they get when they play the game (to the extent that the teachers can set the exact list of words they get when they play the spelling games).
Both our kids also play Prodigy occasionally, but we’ve made it very clear that we’re not going to pay for the subscription, and that all the extras they dangle in front of them are there just to promote the paid version. They don’t improve gameplay much, and that for the same amount of money they could buy three or four used Wii games, a bucketful of second-hand Skylanders, a brand new PS4 controller, or two small Lego sets, so it really makes no sense when they only play it for 20 hours a year. They seem to understand and are not resentful at all.
Regarding the cherry syrup, that does seem to contravene EU law, given that cherry syrup is normally made my boiling down actual cherries and sugar. In my experience, EU law has not percolated fully to the more recent additions: food production is just one area where Eastern European consumer-beware lawlessness and outright fraud still pervades. (Online marketplaces are an emerging unregulated source of cheap but shitty products in the West.)
cvoinescu @# 21
Latvian online grocery stores never provide ingredient lists for products anywhere at all. Most larger Latvian food brands have their homepages, and those never provide ingredient lists either. This really annoys me given how I won’t even consider buying something without first finding out what’s inside it.
silverfeather @#20
Being childfree, I don’t pay much attention to stuff aimed at kids, so it is hard for me to judge changes in trends. That being said, new technology creates new opportunities how to manipulate a child. For example, micro transactions weren’t possible in games that were sold two decades ago back when I was a child. So, yes, I agree that manipulation is increasing in psychological intensity, because new technologies allow more sophisticated and perfectly tailored forms of manipulation.
By the way, back when I was a child, inside my school there was a vending machine that sold soft drinks like Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite. The school didn’t provide drinking water for children. The school didn’t offer any juices or other healthier drinks either. If a child wanted something to drink, the only option was a vending machine with shitty soft drinks. And, no, there was no bottled drinking water in that vending machine, only soft drinks. I guess my school put up that vending machine, because it was profitable to do so.
Back when I was a child, my mother told me that tap water must be boiled before it was safe to drink. She advised me against simply drinking the tap water that could be obtained in school’s toilets. (Nowadays I just drink non boiled tap water. I have no clue whether drinking water in Latvia was worse 20 years ago or whether my mother simply was paranoid.)
Anyway, I think I heard that recently Latvia banned sales of soft drinks inside schools, so people are at least trying to improve some of the problems.
cvoinescu @#21
I am genuinely glad that has been your children’s experience. It is not every child’s experience, as the many reviews written by children about this product will attest.
In addition, apparently the game has changed in recent years for the worse, so when you say that the membership doesn’t affect the experience much I wonder if you are working with old information. At this point (in the U.S. at least) the pets cannot be evolved without a membership and the Dark Tower cannot be accessed past level 5 (for what that’s worth to you, lol). I think as a gamer myself I take pay-to-win models of games more seriously than people who have different hobbies and tend to think that model is a “choice” and not a sleazy manipulation in action.
Bottom line, if you as a parent decided to allow your kids to play Prodigy knowing exactly what to expect and warning them what to expect, fine. I wasn’t given the choice and my kid wasn’t given any warning… she was just thrown to the digital wolves because we won’t fund our school districts, this disgusting company saw a way to make money by targeting children, many (mostly older) people think online social experiences including games aren’t “real”, and they don’t have any idea how pinpointed and intense the marketing in these games can be.
Andreas Avester @#23
I experienced the vending machine of sugary crap with no healthy options at my school as well. We also passed some laws to stop that. I think the problems with that scenario are easier for the majority of people to intuitively grasp and want to change.