No sooner had the special issue of Kairos, Illimitations, come off the press than many advertisements in our flat country multiplied the same slogan: » Unlimited « . First there was Proximus, which, for its cell phone offers, wrote everywhere in 1m high letters, « UNLIMITED ». Apparently, there is a category of customers who spend hours watching movies on their smartphones, which requires subscriptions with which you can load data in an unlimited way. Then it was another cell phone operator that gave us its » unlimited » on the radio and on the street ads. Do you believe that this claimed excess was limited to this sector? Not at all: it was then the appliance brand Miele that proclaimed: » Any limits? There is no such thing! « We can only agree with them: the indecency of the advertisements flatters the most unbridled instincts of the consumers without limits. We assume that Miele washing machines will soon be able to chat with the dishwasher while waiting for the master or mistress of the house to return, since, connected, they will have been able to order a small coffee from the perco, who will then have to stop admiring George Clooney on his integrated screen…
BLACK IS BLACK
» Black is black, there is no more hope » sings Johnny Halliday. It is true that we could be desperate when we see so many of our contemporaries succumb to the temptation of overconsumption generated by the Black Friday advertising campaign. Merchants can no longer wait for the end of the year holidays and the January sales and, for the past few years, the « Black Friday » concept has been developing. Like everything else that is hyper commercial, it comes from the United States where the 4th Friday of November is a day off because the day after Thanksgiving Day (day of the massacre of turkeys and thanksgiving to the Lord for the good harvests of the year in the USA), a day of wild sales. And then we are surprised that people back home are worried that they no longer feel at home but are being invaded by cultures from elsewhere (mostly from across the Atlantic). The n°3 of the free Metro of this Friday, November 27th had a special edition of 30 pages, full of ads, with dozens of times the words » Black Friday « . If you were to pay close attention, next to the four-colored advertisements, you could see small articles entitled » Beware of prying connected toys » or » New record threshold for greenhouse gases « . We feel sorry for our colleagues who try to pass on messages of reason but who are overwhelmed by the marketing-oriented logic of their owner, the Rossel Group.
That the mercantile try to invent a thousand opportunities to make you spend your beautiful money, we can understand it while disapproving, but that the SNCB, offers return tickets at 5€ for this day of buying fever, we are entitled to be amazed. And then we realize that the minister in charge of our railways is a liberal Ardennes man. It’s too bad he’s not as creative in advancing the RER network that has been awaited in vain for nearly 30 years.
Alain Adriaens