Thursday, November 29, 2007

Irony?

Every year Hess gas stations come out with a toy truck for the holidays. So many years it was a tanker truck of one vintage or the other. There was a space shuttle flatbed, a firetruck (as I remember), there was even a helicopter in more recent times.

So this year, as oil flirts with $100 a barrel, what did they decide to have as the truck this year? A tanker? A bus (as in "mass transit fights terrorism")? No, they wanted to make a stronger statement than that...

Is this some sort of insidious campaign to say "don't worry"? Kind of like "sure you get nosebleeds when you snort my coke, but they are good for you!". Are they mocking me? Are they saying "we can slap you in the face and you will still give us your money" ($30+ in this case)?

I don't think so. In my world, Hess is actually making a better statement than selling any model of a prototype hybrid tractor-trailer. Nay; they are rubbing our over-consuming, plastic-surgery-tailored American noses in the real problem. It doesn't take a cryptographer to read "drive useless big gas guzzlers, prices increase, you do the math" (that's top to bottom - the Japanese convention... who are one group of people laughing their way to the bank in their Prius).

Am I preaching? No - I get 26 MPG. But I am laughing at the irony.

2 comments:

frosty said...

For those of you that follow the comments, I waxed verbose about Walmart last post. So here is a bit of irony: while searching for a link to include in this post (via Google and the search phrase "hybrid tractor trailer"), this article was result #3.
It was my first search phrase too. It's a bit creepy, but has led to my new blog tagline: "Google reads my blog and thinks it's funny".

Speroni said...

I'm not sure this is irony, they're in the business of selling gas...?

It's more like selfishness and ignorace with just a trace of evil.