Brandjack News

By Quentin Langley

UK supermarket, Sainsbury's, has incentives in place for its staff to encourage shoppers to buy more. You would think this is nothing remotely odd, but it is slightly embarrassing that a poster aimed at staff was displayed in a store, photographed, and tweeted. The image has been retweeted almost five thousand times at the time of writing. They want to encourage every customer to spend an extra 50p (81 cents).

Twitterati, of course, had their own suggestions. Perhaps staff will slip a few extra items in a shop or scan an item costing 50p twice.

In an article on its business pages the Guardian seems to have abandoned even the slightest pretense of separating news and comment. I suppose we could argue that the Guardian confusing news and comment is as surprising as a supermarket trying to sell products to shoppers.

But the newspaper's incomprehension of voluntary exchange is so deep and so visceral that a simple offer of cut price chocolate with a newspaper at W H Smith is described as "force feed[ing] customers giant slabs of chocolate at the cash register". This unhinged metaphor would be out of place in a tabloid comment column but is included as normal in the Guardian's business coverage.