Misleading Packaging

            You’ve seen this movie before:  Man encounters mousy-looking female in loose-fitting clothing.  She’s probably portrayed as nerdy, wearing inordinately thick glasses, sporting disheveled hair, no makeup, and interacts with men with all the grace and poise of a truck-driver.  Invariably, by the movie’s denouement, she is sporting some skin-tight dress in which she looks absolutely ravishing, her makeup is flawless, her hair is impeccably coiffed, and her previous wit now manifests as confident wit mixed with seductive flirtation. This sequence has been permuted, tweaked, and manipulated ad infinitum by the Hollywood film industry.  Though this plot arc is usually uplifting, the audience is aware, even at the movie’s beginning that the female lead is played by a tremendously fit, attractive woman who is conveniently packaged in a manner that renders her appearance anything but.  The reality is, like so many experiences, we are fooled by packaging.

            Advertising, clothing, even conversations are often simply mechanisms to package one thing as something else.  Such a realization brought me to one of my dearest hobbies – scrabble.  Ostensibly, scrabble is a game played with letters and words.  It is undeniably packaged as such, and frequently, those with extensive vocabularies feel confident as a game of scrabble begins while those with more limited arrays of verbiage at their disposal feel decidedly self-conscious.  One evening in college, while mildly inebriated, an English major with whom I was friendly, challenged me to a game.  She was seduced by packaging, certain that her philological tendencies and her ivy league English education would easily trump me, the quantitatively-obsessed engineering geek.  While the latter self-deprecation is accurate, her perception of the activity was not.  Scrabble is a mathematical exercise in optimal resource management masquerading as linguistic recreation.  A player with a command of the legal two-letter words, a working knowledge of the relative values of the tiles (i.e. never play an S unless that play is worth 20+ points above and beyond your best alternative that does not require the S), solid understanding of board geometry (what is the value of granting or denying access to given squares), and the vocabulary of an average college-graduate will thoroughly dominate the well-read bibliophile without the underlying quantitative skills.  Such was the course of our evening, despite the mildly altered states through which both of us so diligently persevered.  The English major spelled more intricate words, the operations research engineer dominated the scoreboard – which unfortunately for those well-schooled, erudite, literary scholars, determines wins and losses.

            This little anecdote is put forward not as a self-aggrandizing tale of how an engineer emerged triumphant over the highly-favored wordsmith (ok, maybe that reason has some merit…), but rather to illuminate how easily fooled we are by packaging.  This is the same reason that a rib-eye sells for $35 if the walls are nicely adorned with impressionistic art, the table linens are fine cloths replete with the restaurant’s insignia, and one is greeted at the door by a maître d’ clad in a fine suit.  Yet, replace the linens with a plastic table cloth and paper napkins, swap out the Monets for a large taxidermy head with antlers, and replace the suit with a wagon wheel next to a sign which reads “please seat yourself” and suddenly, the sticker price of that delectably charred animal is $14.95.  This is the same rationale for the pair of sneakers which when handed over in a colorful box by a salesman wearing a referee’s uniform in a store with every manner of athletic equipment placed strategically in a suburban mall fetches $125, but when plucked in plastic wrap from the shelves of some Spartan warehouse-like hole-in-the-wall in which customer service is bare bones at best and the location is as inconspicuous as the proprietor, sell for $40.  This explains the value of brand-names, why aesthetically-challenged college students shave their faces, slick their hair, and don stylish clothing at interviews, and why as a species, we care about perceptions a great deal.

            That said, I’ll still take the cheap steak, the sneaker warehouse, and dress up if and only if such behavior is absolutely necessary!