The Sweetest Place on Earth

 Before becoming an adult, I thought Santa Clause was real, and I thought that Disneyworld was really the Happiest Place on Earth. I remember 3 separate occasions where my parents took us on a family vacation from Chicago, Illinois all the way to Orlando, FL for Disneyworld, and I loved it....all the Disney characters I could handle in one place, the outdoor parades through Main Street, the turkey legs, the anticipation of arrivig at the parks by monorail... this was where dreams were made of, we'd made it! This fascination even carried over into adulthood with visits to Disneyland and California Adventure, and even overseas stops at Disney Sea in Tokyo and Disneyland Hong Kong. They really got me. 

The magic really wore off though the last few years, and it all came full circle when MJ and I visited the "Sweetest" place on Earth in Hershey, PA, the propaganda theme parks for the Hershey Chocolate Company. The way I described it to MJ was if business consultants went to Disneyworld and copied all the marketable concepts of those parks, changed the marketing concept from story characters to candy bar characters, and placed it in rural Pennsylvania instead of Florida. That's Hersheyworld. A similar concept was the World of CocaCola in Atlanta; a purely corporate venture blatantly promoting their own products, passing out free candy at every occasion to get their name out there. The place oozed of business executives trying to give off a happy vibe, from blowing sweet-smelling chocolate flavors into the air to employees wearing Hershey uniforms to store packed with merchandise (all marked up significantly) and mellifluent voices on the intercom welcoming visitors to the park and wishing you a sweet day, but under the surface the employees seemed a little off, not exactly happy inwardly but forcing smiles outwardly, knowing they'd seen it all before and trying to mask the inner workings of working for a coporate conglomerate. It reminded me of the Dharma Initiative from Lost or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World; the chocolate at Hersheypark/Chocolate World (they have 2 theme parks right next to each other!) was the soma. There was the 4-D movie, the indoor Pirates-of-the-Caribbean-style theme ride, the long lines to get to the good stuff, the screams coming from the roller coasters and upbeat music coming from the speakers and temperature tuned to a perfect temperature to encourage purchases. Disturbingly, and this is probably from a cynical 35-year-old attorney speaker, I would ot want my kids to be brainwashed into being "Hershey" people and associating chocolate with happiness......the trolley tour guide bold-faced tried to make Hershey bars seem like a nutritious part of one's diet, pointing out the 14% of our daily calcium intake, and that if we had 6 bars we'd be well on our way to our daily allotment.......yea, OK, maybe for calcium, but then we'd be at like 500% of our daily sugar and saturated fat allotment too, so there's that. It's just too easy for kids to fall into the trap like I did of associating places like Chocolateworld and Disneyworld with fun and a beautiful piece of our childhood that we want to stimulate that desire again later in our adult lives......and by then we'd be addicted to sugar/choolate/Twizzlers. 

One interesting marketing trend I noticed.......Hershey's seems to acknowledge now that their most popular brand is Reese's peanut butter cups, and I agree that's their tastiest item: chocolate and peanut butter together in one, who would have guessed people would like that? I have a pretty "standard" tongue where I like what most other people like, and dislike what others don't like; the original Hershey's chocolate bar taste, try as the company might, just doesn't beat out other chocolate bars and isn't the "king of all bars" like they'd like it be; it's got the same taste and doesn't have any distinctiveness about it, like plain vanilla, Americans just aren't rushing to get that bar. They ARE rushing to get Reese's peanutbuttercups, though, and even Hershey's HQ must be acknowledging that now, even though they still have these huge factories that are pumping out 3 million pounds of chocolate a day. Really seem like a precarious business model to me, relying on milk chocolate products in a world that's becoming more health-conscious and vegan (without milk). Maybe they should branch out into some vegan chocolates? Whatever it's doing, though, the company's stock price sure hasn't suffered, with a solid chart and even a 1.84% dividend; perhaps it's the long line of visitors coming to the park especially on hot summer days like today driving the business, without a lagging ESPN and streaming business holding the rest of the company hostage like Disney is. Hmmm.