double dipping

 

 

“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.