“Double dipping” refers to a perfectly legal practice that allows
public employees to collect multiple pensions after they retire. To a minor
degree, I also benefit from this system since I am collecting a small pension
from my years at Fireman’s Fund (funded, ironically, by MetLife, who I also
worked for) in addition to my Social Security checks. On top of that,
additional Social Security taxes are taken from my payroll checks from the
Tucson Unified School District, which will further augment my Social Security
checks over a period of time.
Double dipping can also work for corporations.
Here’s a couple of examples of how that works:
1)
Since the early 1950’s, the first studies linking
cigarette smoking were released. Marlboro capitalized on those studies, not by
claiming that their filter cigarettes were a safer product, but because their product
was “more manly”.
https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-marketing-genius-of-marlboro.html
Since tobacco sales have been sliding for a while, the executives
of Marlboro will soon be expanding into the sale of marijuana cigarettes, since
that product is gradually being legalized in a number of states throughout the
country.
Nicorette was first developed in Sweden in the 1970’s. The
brand consists of a number of products for nicotine replacement therapy (NRT).
The company is currently owned by GlaxoSmithKline and Johnson and Johnson.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicorette#:~:text=The%20Nicorette%20Patch%20was%20introduced%20to%20the%20market,1996%20and%20Nicorette%20Microtab%20%28sublingual%20tablets%29%20in%201999.
Now, imagine if Nicorette was owned by a tobacco company instead
of the companies listed above.
That would be sheer genius.
Tobacco companies would profit from the initial sale of their
product, but they would also profit from products that DISCOURAGE people from
buying cigarettes.
Sound farfetched?
Consider this.
2)
As well all get older, we tend to put on pounds. There
is no shortage of companies that will help us take off those pounds, including
Weight Watchers, SlimFast, Jenny Craig, and Atkins Nutritionals.
The people that run food companies are not dumb. Beginning in the late 1970s, they started buying a
slew of popular diet companies, allowing them to profit off our attempts
to lose the weight we gained from eating their products. Heinz, the
processed food giant, bought Weight Watchers in 1978 for $72
million. Unilever, which sells Klondike bars and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream,
paid $2.3 billion for SlimFast in 2000. Nestle, which makes
chocolate bars and Hot Pockets, purchased Jenny Craig in 2006 for
$600 million, and in 2010 the private equity firm that owns Cinnabon and Carvel
ice cream purchased Atkins Nutritionals, the company that sells
low-carb bars, shakes and snacks. Most of these diet brands were later sold to
other parent companies.
A new book, “Hooked”, by Michael Moss, goes into a more detailed analysis of this phenomenon,
but he discovered that some food products can be more addictive than alcohol,
tobacco, or drugs.
No addictive drug can fire up
the reward circuitry in our brains as rapidly as our favorite foods, Mr. Moss
writes. “The smoke from cigarettes takes 10 seconds to stir the brain, but a
touch of sugar on the tongue will do so in a little more than a half second, or
six hundred milliseconds, to be precise,” he writes. “That’s nearly 20 times
faster than cigarettes.”
This puts the term
“fast food” in a new light. “Measured in milliseconds, and the power to addict,
nothing is faster than processed food in rousing the brain,” he added.
Not surprisingly, tobacco company
executives took note of the addictive power of processed foods.
In the 1980s, Philip Morris
acquired Kraft and General Foods, making it the largest manufacturer
of processed foods in the country, with products like Kool-Aid, Cocoa
Pebbles, Capri Sun and Oreo cookies. But the company’s former general counsel
and vice president, Steven C. Parrish, confided that he found it troubling that
it was easier for him to quit the company’s cigarettes than its chocolate
cookies. “I’m dangerous around a bag of chips or Doritos or Oreos,” he told Mr.
Moss. “I’d avoid even opening a bag of Oreos because instead of eating one or
two, I would eat half the bag.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/well/eat/hooked-junk-food.html?referringSource=articleShare
You are absolutely free to walk into a Baskin Robbins and
order two scoops of your favorite ice cream, but just be aware that the term “double
dipped” is not a term that it easily understood.
