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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Graham Spanier

You Are What You Buy

What’s selling at the campus convenience store? As one who likes to keep up with student tastes, I recently visited one of our campus stores. We have them scattered throughout the residence halls. I realized I didn’t have a clue what some of the new items were. And who knew that microwavable food had become so popular and, apparently, so appealing?

So I spoke with the manager of one of our campus convenience stores and asked for the inventory list. Although the most popular items being sold today include some products I had never heard of, students I interviewed assured me that most of these products are excellent.

The 20 items below alone account for more than 837,000 sales last year.

First (drum roll, please), the top 10 non-drink convenience items:
1. Dannon Light & Fit Strawberry Yogurt
2. Bagel Bites 3 Cheese
3. Stouffers Mac & Cheese meal
4. Bagel Bites Pepperoni
5. Dannon Light & Fit Raspberry Yogurt
6. Nutrigrain Bar Strawberry
7. Hot Pocket Pepperoni Single
8. Nutrigrain Bar Apple Cinnamon
9. Betty Crocker Bowl Appetite 3 Cheese Rotini
10. Lunchables Cheese Pizza

Next, (another drum roll, please), the top ten drink items:
1. 20-ounce Pepsi sodas (Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Sierra Mist are tops)
2. 20-ounce Aquafina Water
3. 20-ounce Gatorade (Glacier Freeze, Fruit Punch, Lemon/Lime are tops)
4. Sobe 20-ounce (Lizard Lava, Lizard Fuel, Power, & Green Tea are tops)
5. Lipton Tea 16-ounce (Lemon, Sweetened, Extra Sweet, Diet w/lemon are tops)
6. Dole Juice (apple, orange, grape, cranberry are tops)
7. Energy Drinks (Amp lemon/line, Amp Overdrive are tops)
8. 1-liter Pepsi Sodas
9. 32-ounce Gatorade (Cool Blue, Lemon/lime, Fruit Punch are tops)
10. 2-liter Pepsi Sodas

Clearly we are a Pepsi school. With sales like this, it is no wonder Pepsi is willing to contribute so much to the scholarships and other funds of the university as a part of our arrangement.

Moreover, it is obvious that parents need not worry about the fluid intake of their children, although I can’t vouch for the shifts that take place in consumption on weekend nights.

Posted at 07:40:13 AM on November 13, 2008 | All postings by gspanier

Comments

  1. I think Graham’s mocking the concerns about privacy safeguards at Penn State which have been expressed in comments on his some of his other posts. Or maybe someone has hacked Graham’s account at CHE to post this and make Graham look foolish.

    You see this post demonstrates a laps in logic. The writer (Is it really you Graham?) contends that Pepsi is willing to donate to the school because of the high demand for its beverages(All ten on the list are Pepsi products) from Penn State students. But this is backwards. Pepsi has had a monopoly on beverage sales at Penn State since the early 90’s when they first signed an agreement with the school to “donate” to it. When you see poor reasoning abilities in a post ostensively written by an erudite university president, it makes you think something’s up.

    And then this person posting under Graham’s name (Could it actually be Graham?) closes with a light-hearted allusion to Penn State’s alcohol abuse problem. A problem that the real Graham has been crusading against since the first days of his administration without any success.One really has to ask, is Graham so determined to be seen as “one of the gang” that will hide his true beliefs or is this a fake Spanier? .

    Maybe Graham gave the keys to this blog to one the the hacks in the Old Main Propaganda Shop with orders to put all those uppity commenters in their place and they punk’d him.

    Oh, hell who knows.

    — veblen · Nov 13, 10:49 AM · #

  2. You complain about Spanier but obviously your life revolves around him. What would you do without him…work?

    — Tom · Nov 13, 11:07 AM · #

  3. That’s a devastating crit, #2: if the messenger has the goods, has the arguments, and presents them fully, he must be obsessed with his subject to the point of not holding a job. Real bright.

    — Just Passing Through · Nov 13, 11:29 AM · #

  4. In my previous post, laps should have been lapse. As soon as I get a job and I can afford it, I’m going to hire a copy editor or maybe buy some fancy grammar check software.

    JPT, thanks for the defense. Penn Staters obsessively follow Joe Paterno’s every move. There are countless blogs devoted to him and Penn State football. Sportswriters make good livings writing about it.People have Nittany Lion shrines in their basements and their lives revolve around home football games. No one thinks that any of this is odd. Ok, I do, but most people don’t. However, if you are concerned about Penn State academics and keep an eye on the president, well, that’s just stange. I guess you have to chalk it up to good old American anti-intellectualism.

    Hey, before I run down to the soup kitchen for my next meal and go off to panhandle, let me share another possible explanation for this post.It could be that the Penn State Pepsi contract requires product placement in any blog written by the university president. Graham may have actually written it. How do the folks at CHE feel about this?

    — veblen · Nov 13, 12:22 PM · #

  5. I have to agree with veblen. Why would President Spanier devote half a column to the observation that Penn State Students drink a lot of Pepsi when it is well known that Penn State has a contract with Pepsi and that competitors’ products can’t be bought on campus? And why does he follow up with an observation that implies that the students are responsible for making Pepsi the number one (through ten) choice on campus, as if he didn’t know about the contract? Perhaps President Spanier gets paid for “product placement” in his public appearances.

    I doubt that the reasons underlying this head-scratcher of a blog are as devious as veblen suggests. I just find it trivial and insulting.

    — Shar · Nov 16, 10:41 PM · #

  6. Shar is much too charitable toward President Spanier’s methods. The guy writes a jovial blog including…

    “Clearly we are a Pepsi school. With sales like this, it is no wonder Pepsi is willing to contribute so much to the scholarships and other funds of the university as a part of our arrangement”…

    …and fails to mention that Pepsi has a contract for exclusivity on campus?

    This is—I’m sorry—de facto journalistic fraud. If Prof. Spanier did this in a sociology paper on student buying habits, he’d be drummed out of the field.

    I think President Spanier owes it to this blogsite to explain himself on this one.

    — LuckyJim · Nov 17, 10:09 AM · #

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