Multicoloured Advertisement Dilemma

It’s a Thursday afternoon. Valery is sitting in the bus coming home from work and she is very hungry. She is thinking about dinner. What could she have? She has a fridge full of food at home but things don’t seem appropriate there. She bought a kilo of potatoes last week that is rotting away on her kitchen sink. She has to eat those potatoes soon, or she will have to throw them away.

But she doesn’t feel like eating potatoes with curd cheese. She wants something fancy, something colourful. She could stop by at the supermarket on her way home and buy deep-fried camenbert with cranberry sauce. It’s colourful and it tastes sweet. She could also bring along some chocolate pudding and some soda for desert while being at the supermarket. That sounds like a plan.

The bus continues and she is looking out of the window. It passes an advertisement poster of a fast food restaurant praising their new low fat full taste tuna sandwich.

Actually, she doesn’t feel like having camenbert anymore, Valerie decides all the sudden, she’d rather feel like having a tuna sandwich. She remembers that she has can of tuna at home, as well as a glass of prickles and some lettuce that is about to rod away in her fridge. But she doesn’t have the right bread to make a tuna sandwich. She could stop by at the bakery and get some bread, but at 5 in the afternoon they probably won’t have any left. But two bus stations from her home there is this fast food place – she could just take the bus there before even going home, get a sandwich and next door there is this coffee place, she could get some caramel flavoured iced cappuccino there. That sounds great. She has coffee and milk at home, but at home it never has this sweet, artificial taste that’s so addictive.

Or maybe, she could eat something with ketchup – it occurs to her all the sudden. But actually she doesn’t like ketchup. How did she come up with that idea anyway? Then, she notices the advertisement for a ketchup bottle hanging on the inside of the bus, right in front of her eyes. Is that the only reason why she feels like eating ketchup now? Is it so easy to manipulate her? 

She decides that she doesn’t let herself be manipulated that easily. She decides to say no to consumerism – at least for today. She is not going to spend any money that day. Instead she will go straight home and make herself the potatoes sitting in her kitchen and be happy. She won’t let herself be terrorized by advertisement anymore. After all, she likes potatoes much more than fried cheese or tuna sandwiches.