#337 Kontainer

Did you ever notice that there were plenty of sports drinks before the energy drink came along. Gatorade and what not. Before Gatorade came in a million flavors and supposed uses. Then came Red Bull and the energy drink. Red Bull was unabashedly caffeine in mega doses. That caught on so out came Monster, Whoopass, Rockstar, and their ilk. Seems that non-sports people needed energy too. And the computer nerd who spent forty-seven hours at a stretch behind his monitor needed something catchier than coffee to keep him awake all night playing interactive role-playing games. His avatar got to have energy pellets, why shouldn’t he? The energy drink is the sports drink divorced from the sport. All that sweaty electrolyte stuff the sports drink was meant to replace now need not be shed or added back and the energy drink can concentrate on the two natural sources of energy, sugar and caffeine. Then each energy drink tried to bond with a specific consumer. If you don’t think they thought this whole thing out listen to this squib I retrieved from a website selling the new energy drink Mercury. “Proven brand building with the 18-24 market. Marketing is designed to make mercury a ‘discovery’ brand. 10-24 Singles reject mass marketing from big companies for ‘ownership’ of new products. Gatorade and SoBe both “discovery” brands initially...”
So you see, these things don’t just suddenly appear from nowhere, they’re made to appear from nowhere for “discovery” purposes. Then they delineate their product by color and most important, packaging, which, in the case of energy drinks, means bottle shape. I despair that we will ever have a recycle-based economy, so obsessive is America’s need for the new and different. I know that plastic bottles can’t be washed and refilled on an industrial scale. At least so they tell us. But think of all the man hours that must go into designing new bottle shapes, tooling up the equipment to mold the new plastic bottle shape and then the retooling necessary to configure bottle machine robots to recognize and manipulate the new bottle shape in the automatic bottling process. Can’t this energy be used somewhere else to better effect—working out the bugs in ethanol production perhaps, or designing some combination of individual transport and mass transit that people will use? Look at the containership container. It revolutionized shipping. Why? Because someone had the bright idea of always using the same size reusable container to ship everything. Now boats and trucks and trains can all use the same thing. What a concept, reusable interchangeable parts, the greatest American invention of the industrial age. You know, back when they got their energy from food. If you could only bottle wisdom...
America, ya gotta love it.