So how would Heinz rebrand British Gas?
The news that Salad Cream is considering changing its name to Sandwich Cream put me fondly in mind of British Gas. Kraft Heinz, the vast conglomerate that makes the 100-year-old goo, is considering a change because, as its spokesman told trade magazine the <Italic> Grocer</Italic>, the name no longer “fairly represents the product’s ingredients or usage occasions”.
Obviously this raises as many questions as it answers, and I haven’t even got to why it made me think of gas. In fact, I probably mentioned that too soon because there’s quite a lot I need to get out of my system first about this quote – a process that coincidentally may make you think of gas as well.
The name no longer represents its ingredients? What does that mean? No one ever thought the stuff was made of salad, did they? Are they now hoping to imply that it’s made of sandwiches? Sandwiches are a very unusual ingredient – they’re more of an end product of a culinary process, like a pie or an omelette or a pavlova. You don’t put sandwiches in things, you put things in sandwiches. Salad Cream, for example.
So I get the “usage occasions” part. Apparently, these days only 14% of the cream’s usage occasions are saladous, while I imagine considerably more are sandwich some (I claim first usage occasion of both of those adjectives). And this anomaly has started to irk some of the people at Kraft Heinz: people who are paid to consider tinkering with things, and probably feel their salaries are harder to justify if they always say everything’s fine as it is. The more they think about Salad Cream being used on sandwiches, and not being used on salads, the more it’s like a painting that needs straightening, the more it niggles.
Speaking of niggles, there’s no cream in it, in case that thought’s been bothering you for a couple of paragraphs. Obviously it is a sort of cream (as in opaque viscous liquid), but it contains no cream (as in what rises to the top of the milk) at all. So the second part of its name isn’t an ingredient signifier either, and they’re planning to keep it anyway. I hadn’t missed that – I just thought it went without saying. And then my confidence that it went without saying ebbed away until I said it anyway, just as the confidence at Kraft Heinz that calling something Salad Cream will not be taken as prohibiting its use in other contexts has ebbed away until they stand on the brink of an epic cock-up: customers looking for Salad Cream suddenly won’t be able to find it and there is currently no one in the world, wandering around any supermarket anywhere, looking for a substance called Sandwich Cream. “Disappointed with your current sandwich-moistening agent? Why not try something you’ve never heard of from Heinz?”
This literalism in nomenclature has been elegantly avoided by the managers of British Gas. They haven’t changed to “British Gas and Electricity”, “British Energy” or, in tribute to the item they most noticeably provide, “British Bills”. And this certainly isn’t because the firm lacks the cash to rebrand. Like all of the Big Six energy providers, it put up the price of its standard variable tariff last month meaning that, put together, they’re raking in an extra £570m of revenue per year.
British Gas is probably my favourite of the Big Six energy providers, but the truth is I love them all. I love how much they irritate politicians and consumer experts. Last month’s rises were typical, described by energy minister Claire Perry as “unjustified”, by Gillian Guy of Citizens Advice as “extremely disheartening”, and by Alex Neill of Which? as “another slap in the face for customers already feeling the pinch” (but no hope of a tickle), with Martin Lewis, founder of MoneySavingExpert.com, concluding that “Anyone on a Big Six standard tariff is ripping themselves off.”
I love all this, in the same way that I love it when a paedophile wins the lottery. Both phenomena are such eloquent illustrations of the flaws in their respective systems. And I dislike both systems, so it’s great to give those flaws an airing. Just as a sex criminal randomly winning a fortune makes it clear that lottery balls have no sense of moral justice, the fact that the largest operators in the domestic energy marketplace offer some of the highest tariffs is a lovely demonstration that the forces of market competition aren’t functioning.
Can you imagine this pattern in any market that worked? A world where the six largest supermarket chains charged more for groceries than their smaller rivals, yet somehow sustained their share of business? Where Amazon secured a dominant online position despite also charging more than other retailers? It couldn’t happen in the presence of genuine market forces, which is conclusive proof that the 25-year experiment in attempting to introduce those forces to the domestic energy market has failed. We’ve given it a massive go, people didn’t like it, they couldn’t be arsed to keep changing supplier, so the time has come to renationalise.
It’s not very surprising. It never seemed like it would amp; #xa0; work. If you had 20 or 30 different light switches amp; #xa0; on every wall, with a price marked on each, then you’d have a market. Obviously that’s impractical, but hardly more so than expecting millions of consumers to make the running – to research who’s offering the best price, go through the admin hassle of changing supplier, then keep tabs on when prices get automatically hiked if you don’t change, or threaten to change, supplier again. That’s not a very appealing process to anyone mortal.
So why don’t we just opt once and for all for the one that’s called British Gas? En masse. Embrace the supplier-changing hassle this one time and we’ll never have to do it again. The other suppliers will go under and the state will have to take over to avoid a private monopoly. And no one will nag us to “shop around” ever again. Let’s do it. If you see Sid, tell him.