So What, Who Cares (vol 1, issue 60) How the American chocolate market is about to get pricey

Good evening! I am running on a one-two-three combination of very little sleep, an incipient respiratory infection and crunch time at the day job. So this edition is short and/or composed on a lot of Nyquil.

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The American chocolate market is about to get interesting. From Godiva trying to maintain a luxury image while offering (comparatively) cheap $6 smoothies to Hershey beginning a subtle repositioning of itself as a whole-foods-type brand with the ditching of high-fructose corn syrup for the more wholesome-seeming sugar, a lot of companies will be jockeying for their slices of the estimated $1.2 billion Americans will spend on premium-brand chocolate this year.

So what? Premium candy sales are a reliable profit engine in the U.S. -- their growth rate is triple that of regular chocolate sales -- and the battle is on between Hershey (which owns Scharffen Berger and Dagoba), Mars (which owns Ethel M., Pure Dark and Dove) and Lindt (which owns Lindt, Russell Stover, Ghiradelli). Since food culture is trending toward authenticity and origin stories, expect chocolate to follow suit.

Who cares? Foodies. We're about to enter into an age of chocolate snobbery, where everything from the sourcing of the beans to the production of the chocolate will be used as a competitive angle to justify charging $260 for a 1.7 ounce chocolate bar. I mean, the bar comes with tweezers because you don't want the oils from human fingers interacting with dark chocolate, so that tells you what level of obsession chocolate makers are hoping to engender.

And since people will pay up for a food's distinguishing quality if there's a certain cultural cachet involved, it's likely we'll see a surge in status chocolate soon. This will probably coincide with the slowdown in general chocolate production. (vol 1, issue 55)

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Your holiday pop culture note of the day: Way back when Generation X was young, people like Thomas Frank, John Seabrook and Daniel Harris pointed out how consumerism was really great at taking fun and/or original expressions of personal taste, identifying the sociocultural indicators that made them cool or outsider-y, then repackaging them for a mass market.

(Your reading on this subject: Frank's The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism; Seabrook's Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture; Harris's Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism.)

"You don't say!" -- Everyone who has ever walked by an Urban Outfitters and seen how they sell an exact replica of the tree from the Charlie Brown holiday special.

Anyway, way back in the early Aughties, an artist named Leslie Hall began collecting gem sweaters. Naturally, there was soon a holiday tie-in and now here we are in 2014 with ugly Christmas sweaters being sold with the irony pre-installed.

This 2007 interview with Leslie Hall is fantastic because she really commits to those sweaters:

Q: Who should you give a gem sweater to for the holidays?

A: Do you have a relative who hits the slot machines? Who enjoys crafting? Who is a party girl who doesn’t like to wear low-cut tops? Who is pleasantly plump and doesn’t know what size she is? Because gem sweaters are all generic sizes.

Q: What is the proper reaction if someone gives you gem sweater?

A: Eyes widen, eyebrows lift. Your reaction might be to not touch it and touch your face like the Home Alone kid – (but) keep your hands on the sweater. Hold it to your chest and stand up, maybe a little scream. And put it on immediately.

Hall has appeared on Yo! Gabba Gabba and while it is true she's in the Christmas episode, that particular show is not nearly so festive an occasion as the episode "DJ Lance's Super Music and Toy Room." That episode is 23 minutes of accretive lunacy, starting with Patton Oswald voicing a frog emcee who dresses like Prince and culminating in a celebration of friends and family that stars Bootsy Collins, Biz Markie, Mark Mothersbaugh, and a kick line with Erykah Badu and Leslie Hall.

Watch "DJ Lance's Super Music and Toy Room." It's all-ages appropriate, it's festive and focuses on the real reason we celebrate things, and you can sidestep all manner of holiday landmines from the Santa question to gift-giving.

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Did you miss an issue of So What, Who Cares? The archive is here.

Also, there is now a topic index that tells you what was in each issue. If you're like, "When did she send out a picture of Brandon Routh snuggling a kitty cat?" -- well, now you can find it. (It was November 11, 2014, btw.)

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