Just had an enlightening conversation with my corner storage checkout lady about insidious product design.
I was completely unaware of this, but apparently Swisher Sweet controls a whole line of products, which include nicotine vapes, of course their regular tobacco products(including nicotine pouches), and now kid-friendly caffeine pouches.
What's wild to me is if you think about this from like a product streamline, you get kids used to the format of nicotine pouches by having their parents buy them sweet and candy flavored caffeine pouches. Then eventually, used to a pouch format, they graduate to something like a zen because they try one. And once they're hooked on nicotine, probably graduate to a product like an actual nicotine product or a vape
I don't know if anyone else has read the two books Known as Venus Inc., but inside the dystopian sci-fi series, there is multiple corporations who have product lines that trigger cravings for other product lines. You smoke a cigarette, meaning you need one of their sodas, which means you need one of their snacks, which then retriggers the craving for the cigarette, and the cycle begins, you know, keeps going on and on.
There is part of me, I guess, that knew that this was going on on some level already, but to see it's so blatant, was absolutely wild.
