Charles Dickens

"Individualized Labels Aimed at the Overeducated Instead of having a one-size-fits-all private label like the supermarkets, we tried to individualize each label to each product. Wherever I could, therefore, I used artistic, or musical, or literary, or historical, or scientific allusions in the product names. Thus, when we got into private label baked goods, we had the Brandenberg Brownies, the Sir Isaac Newtons, The Bagel Spinoza, The Peanut Pascal, Disraeli & Gladstone’s British Muffins, etc. My favorite of all the private labels was Heisenberg’s Uncertain Blend of coffee beans. At the coffee roaster they process different batches of beans and some fall off the conveyor. Periodically they would sweep these up, roast them, and sell them to us for very little money. The blend, from batch to batch, was literally uncertain. And the label gave the Encyclopedia Britannica’s explanation of Werner Heisenberg’s Nobel Prize–winning 1927 discovery, one of the keystones of modern physics. How many customers had ever heard of Heisenberg? Not many. But the ones who understood the joke were literally bonded to us forever. And the price of the coffee was so cheap that non-initiates bought it. Some of my other favorite names are Trader Darwin’s Vitamins (for the survival of the fittest), Little Cat Feet dry cat food (pace Carl Sandburg), Habeas Crispus potato chips, Eve’s Apple Sparkled by Adam, Trader Cleopatra’s My Salad Days vinegar, Trader Gainsborough’s Blue Boy blueberry syrup, Great Expectations kibble for puppies. Oh, we did had fun!"

"The solution to the challenge was the telenovela. This format had little to do with the teleteatros; in most cases, its content and style were not related to literary works. Rather, the telenovela arose from radio, specifically from Cuban radio of the 1930s and 1940s. Radio soap operas adopted the melodramatic style of nineteenth-century novelists, such as Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac, and of the American radio soap operas of the 1930s, created by large companies to promote their products."