Seth Goldman: Mayor Bloomberg and Our 16.9-Ounce Tea

Wall Street Journal ^ | July 22, 2012 | Seth Goldman

[Alberta's Child]

Dear Seth:

Rather than complain about the adverse impact of Bloomberg's idiotic proposal on your business, you should see this as a glorious opportunity. Make a hard marketing push for your product in the City's outlying suburbs, including exclusive deals at retailers near train stations in Long Island, Westchester and New Jersey.

This is the problem you face when your prime customer base is the same group of people who push with this kind of nanny-state sh!t in New York City.

Sincerely,

Alberta's Child

[NOezmoney]

Look like Rush got the Bloomberg memo with his 16oz bottles of 'TwoIfByTea' product.

[zeugma]

Notice how he takes a chunk of his column to go through the fiction that his 16.9 ounce bottle is ‘two servings’, and so there are actually only 35 calories per serving in his product?

Yeah. Pretty silly. Intelligent folk realize the "serving size" is the multiplier for anything on the label.

[9YearLurker]

Yeah, they might as well just call it their 24-hour soda 2-for-1 ‘happy hour’.

[HiTech RedNeck]

I think the FDA with its nutritional label standardization rules, which specify the range that a “serving” should fall in, is to blame for this arbitrary distinction. Otherwise it would make sense to call the whole 16.9 ounce bottle one serving.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Nah, Rush was using the American measures long before Bloomberg started his soda jihad. A coinkydink.

[9YearLurker]

Yes, but he’s blathering about it here to try to make it sound like he’s got a lower-calorie product than he has. That’s how manufacturers use the serving designation—and they’re free to determine what their serving size should be.

[EyeGuy]

“As a fellow entrepreneur with a public-service orientation, I have been a longtime admirer of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s entrepreneurial spirit and commitment to acting on his principles.”

####

You’d tone your embarrassing brown-nosing down several notches if Bloomberg were a conservative Christian, now wouldn’t you Goldman?

[HiTech RedNeck]

I can’t see it that way since the product has quite enough merit on its own. 6 ounces of Coca Cola (half a standard can) or 16.9 ounces of that slightly sweetened tea (the whole bottle)? I think if I were calorie counting I’d know which one I’d prefer.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Honest Tea's top-selling item is our organic Honey Green Tea, which has 35 calories per eight-ounce serving

That's the full extent of the "blathering" and it's tied, I believe, to a set of loose standards about what a serving can be for the sake of those FDA mandated nutrition labels. A 16.9 ounce serving would exceed this.