Thomas Johnson - The Blog

Recently I wrote (about the mattress industry) consumer scams are designed to mislead or part you from your money, and many are permitted under marketing hyperbole.   I looked into the labelling of the breakfast cereal oats. Tiger Consumer Brands’ Jungle Oats (various variants) and Pioneer Foods’ Bokomo Oats Instant state “100% Wholegrain Pure Oats” prominently, but in smaller print on the back of the package under ingredients says it’s actually made from “oat flakes, gluten (allergen)”, i.e., wheat, barley or rye.   A popular “health food” brand sold in supermarkets, pharmacies and health shops says “oats is naturally free from wheat” but the ingredients states: “oats, gluten”.   Other brands including Woolworths, Pick ‘n Pay, Checkers and Spar house brands also have “oats” containing gluten, but at least they don’t claim its “100% pure wholegrain oats”. This is significant to me because as a non-coeliac gluten sensitivity sufferer I’m trying to find an a...

Helen Zille is one of my three least favourite people because I find her a supercilious know-all and disingenuous, and she moved the DA to the right. I am loathe to take her side but the anger and criticism she’s receiving about her colonialism comments   especially from people like media personality Eusebius McKaiser and DA leader Mmusi Maimane are hypocritical. McKaiser was educated at the University of Oxford, and in his book A Bantu in My Bathroom boasted about his time there. Maimane was educated at an apartheid/colonial-era school, Wits and Bangor University, Wales.   These institutions are products of colonialism, Oxford being the nursery of Cecil John Rhodes, which the university’s Famous Oxonians website lists as “ colonial pioneer, founder of the Rhodes Scholarships”. Missionary schools played a significant role educating particularly blacks but their founders – European missionaries who arrived with colonialists – had an ambiguous “moral sel...

Consumer scams are designed to confuse and get you to part with your money.   But some are perpetrated by companies under the rubric “marketing”, or just mediocre service.   Often consumers, through ignorance and trust in the retailer/manufacturer, are none the wiser.   My hobby horse is the mattress industry.   A Strand-based manufacturer’s website states its Cover Concept range is the “most luxurious mattress in the world”.   That’s a lie: that honour goes to Sweden’s H ä stens Vividus costing £ 120 000, and which lasts 25 years.   Each Vividus bed takes 320 hours to make.   (They also make more “reasonably” priced mattresses and beds from about R70 000.) No-one, especially people in the trade, can claim “luxury”, “bespoke” or “high quality” when exemplars of the real deal exist, particularly when consumers can google it.   But this is symptomatic of the mattress industry – scams and misinformation most consumers are not aware of when...