goodcopybadcopy

Let me tell you about my morning shop in M&S today.

First stop: fruit. Eschewing the delights of “juicy strawberries”, “tasty redcurrants”, “luscious blackberries”, “tangy cranberries” and “zingy granny smith apples”, I eventually plumped for some:

(Distinctly unlocal and out of season so apologies to any eco-foodies, but I just had to get a pic and I didn’t think the security guard would take kindly to me whipping my camera out in-store).

Anyway, moving past the “crisp celery hearts” I decided on some:

Fancying some cheese, I forwent the “sweet and nutty Jarlsberg”, the “soft and crunchy Greek feta” and the comma-free “mellow smooth Red Leicester”, instead choosing:

While at the dairy counter I picked up some:

(Actually, I’m not really sure what “farm assured” means and I suspect there should be a hyphen in there somewhere).

Finally, given the choice of two types of coriander, I declined the common-or-garden variety in favour of:

This latter purchase differed from the ordinary coriander by virtue of the presence of a small blue rubber band holding the stalks together. Well, who wouldn’t be swayed by such an obviously beneficial add-on?

Incidentally, I then had to wait 10 minutes to be served in a virtually empty store because there was only one till in use out of about 15.

So here’s my message to Stuart Rose in these bleak days for retail: fire the copywriter you pay to come up with all those silly descriptors and employ some more on-the-ground staff instead.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 2:02 pm and is filed under How not to write. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.