As if everything that happened this year wasn’t enough – really bad news, a catastrophe in the last few days makes everything even more horrible and the past twelve months to forget: The mustard bottler Thomy has attached a screw cap to his glasses!
In order to understand the full extent of this disaster, one has to know that the Thomy mustard jars had a second, much more lasting purpose besides the mustard storage purpose – they were, once emptied, perfect as drinking glasses, easy to hold , with exactly the right filling quantity, occasionally painted with funny cartoon characters (Maya the Bee, Smurfs) and above all not expensive, so that they could be entrusted to clumsy children’s hands without any problems. That’s how it was in German households for a long time: the “good glasses” only came out when visitors came or when it was Christmas, the rest of the year you drank from a motley assortment of the most diverse containers, and nobody would have thought of when Setting the supper table to insist on stylistically uniform design.
Well, meanwhile there is Ikea, so that even the most precarious Schwabing student flatmates can stock up on the Ivrig drinking glass – four for 9.99 euros. But that never comes close to the satisfaction of having eaten your own dishes, so to speak. On average, how often did you have to have Wieners with mustard before a glass was empty and could go to the others in the cupboard? That was a proud process, because it resulted in equipment that wasn’t simply bought together, commerce, commerce, but was actually saved from the mouth.
The manufacturer justifies its step by saying that for many customers it was too complicated to tear the previous tin lid off the glass every time. That doesn’t sound very credible – it’s getting much more complicated now that the empty mustard jar can no longer be used sustainably, but instead has to be fed into the recycling process together with its damned screw thread. If Thomy had just a little honor and a sense of tradition in its body, it would reverse the step and reintroduce the snap-top jar. Because innovations don’t always lead to improvements, and if you want to add your two cents to something, then from a glass that still has value even after it’s been emptied.