Meaningless, You Mean It's All Been Meaningless

This bugs me.  It's a Wal-Mart banner ad that popped up when I looked at Sitemeter to count all the people not looking at my site. 

So the brand name is "Genuine Steakhouse," therefore they are Genuine Steakhouse Steaks.  This does not mean anything.  They are not "genuine" anything, nor are they coming from a "steakhouse," except for, I guess the slaughterhouse, which is a house where steaks come from.  The next sentence, "100% freshness guaranteed or your money back" is also pretty lean on meaning.  One would hope that spoiled, past-due meat would not be sold in the first place and I think it's safe to say that, should that meat accidentally get sold, it would certainly be accepted for a refund.  Then again, I don't know much about Wal-Mart, so maybe they are always selling rotten meat and not giving you money back for it.  Who's to say.

What they have cleverly done here is put a bunch of connotation-rich words near each other, in a construction that prevents the words from having any kind of actual meaning that might make it incumbent upon the company to provide anything even slightly out of the ordinary.  Genuine Steakhouse...100% guaranteed...money back.  A casual gloss could easily give you the false impression that they are somehow guaranteeing that this meat has a certain level of quality, or comes from a specific steakhouse, or something like that.  In fact, they are just announcing the fact that they are putting a trademarked brand name on run-of-the-mill USDA-whatever meat, and then guaranteeing that they won't sell it once it putrifies. 

Tip o' the Kebab to you, Wal-Mart!

UPDATE:  I was wrong!  It seems that RESTRICTIONS APPLY to this freshness guarantee.  So in some markets, your mystery, trademarked meat may also be rotten. 

Comments

[Matthew Grundy Rutledge]

I found this article not by looking at your blog via the link on my own blog, but by way of Consumerist, and for that, I'm kind of indifferent.