You'll be surprised how this post ends with obsessing about corn syrup.

Sometimes, there will be a little marketing catchphrase that gets my attention in such a way that once I've heard it, I'm incapable of focusing on the product at hand.  These little phrases have clearly been focus-grouped to within an inch of their lives, and with the assistance of millions of dollars to boot.  Obviously they're effective, else they wouldn't be used so damn often.  Once I tell you which one I'm thinking of, start listening for it in commercials and in print ads -- I bet you'll hear or see it at least three times in the next week.

"Powdermilk Biscuits, made from whole wheat raised in the rich bottomlands of the Lake Wobegon river valley by Norwegian bachelor farmers, so you know they're not only good for you, but also pure, mostly.  Look for them in the big blue box with the picture of a biscuit on the front of it.  Available where you buy groceries."

First of all, my apologies to Garrison Keillor for implying that the noble Powdermilk Biscuit company would stoop to using such vacant ad copy as this.

Second of all, how on earth did "they" decide that "where you buy groceries" was the best way to encourage people to look for and purchase the item in question?  It's the sort of non-specific framing that might accompany a general-audience mention of religion.  "Your place of worship."  That makes perfect sense, since just about everyone's got one, but they're called lots of different things.  But "where you buy groceries"?  I don't know about you, but I buy groceries at the store.  The grocery store.  Sure, you might call it "the grocery," "the market," "the food market," or even, improbably, the "grocery food market store," but I'm sure nobody would be too confused with any of these interchangeable terms.

Now, if they'd prefer to go with the also-popular "available in the _______ section," I'm with them.  How much of your life have you wasted wandering through the aisles at the place where you buy groceries, looking for one thing that you've never bought before and have no idea where it lives?  The manufacturer of the product is really helping out in this case.

Pop quiz --  where in the place where you buy groceries do they keep the corn syrup?

Corn syrup quiz answer:  Next to all the pancake syrup.  I know that's wrong because nobody should be putting corn syrup on their pancakes.  This is not 1950, everybody.  Please move the corn syrup to its rightful location with the rest of the baking ingredients.  I recommend just beneath the shredded coconut. Yeah, bottom shelf is fine.  Great.  Now take this pricing gun and go mark up all the junk food sky-high, and make healthy stuff dirt cheap.  Now run, because Big Corn's a-coming for us!!!

Funny story -- I went looking for an old corn syrup ad, one that shows a scrappy young boy pouring clear gooey corn syrup all over his hotcakes, and found this instead.  It turns out that in 1910, 101 years ago, we still had to be told where to buy things.  But you'll notice they just go with the most common sense approach.