By Joe Broadmeadow
I spent twenty years investigating crimes, some petty, some serious, and I thought I had seen every conceivable way an institution could underestimate the intelligence of the public it serves. Then Bazooka Brands sent my grandson four Ring Pops, and I realized I had more to learn.
Let me set the scene. My grandson, a boy with discerning taste and the kind of righteous indignation you only see in the very young and the very honest, opened a package of Bazooka candy (Ring pops to be precise) and found the pieces misshapen, lumpy little monuments to a quality control process that had apparently taken the day off.
He would not eat them. He is a man of principle, even at his age, and I respect that. (Actually we wouldn’t let him, but he was slightly hesitant.) So, I did what any grandfather with a working pen and a long institutional memory would do. I wrote a letter.
To their credit, Bazooka’s customer relations team responded with warmth and sympathy that would not have been out of place at a hostage negotiation. They understood. They apologized. They assured me this was not the Bazooka standard, that quality mattered to them, that my grandson’s disappointment had been heard at the highest levels of their organization, or at least at whatever level answers letters about lumpy candy.
And then came the settlement: four Ring Pops. Not four bags, four individually wrapped pieces.
Four. I want you to sit with that number for a moment, the way I used to sit with a suspect’s alibi, turning it over, looking for the seam where the story falls apart. Four pieces of candy, a settlement that likely cost the corporation somewhere south of a penny, mailed out with all the ceremony of a parole board granting time served.
I have given this company decades of loyalty. As a boy with what I can only describe, in hindsight, as a brief but brilliant baseball career, brief being the operative word, I consumed what must have been hundreds of pieces of Bazooka bubblegum in dugouts across Rhode Island.
I chewed it during rain delays. I chewed it to look tough between innings I mostly spent on the bench. On at least one or two regrettable occasions, in the fog of youthful confidence, I swallowed it, trusting the old playground legend that it would simply pass through and do no lasting harm, a leap of faith I would not recommend to a jury today.
That is a lifetime of brand loyalty. That is market research money cannot buy. And for it, Bazooka Brands has now formally compensated my family with four pieces of candy, replacing the defective units with, one assumes, four more units drawn from the exact same production line that produced the defective ones in the first place.
It is less a resolution than a rematch.
In my old line of work, we called this a pattern. You do not send a suspect back into the same room with the same weapon and call the matter closed. Yet here is Bazooka, having received a formal complaint about misshapen candy, responding to that complaint with more candy from the identical batch of uncertain shape. If my grandson opens that envelope and finds four more lopsided little bricks of pink gum, I will not be surprised. I will be validated.
I understand the economics at play. A company the size of Bazooka Brands cannot be expected to dispatch an investigator, issue a formal apology on letterhead, or offer restitution proportional to decades of loyal chewing. I am not asking for a pension. I am not asking for a statue. I am asking, as a lifelong customer and a man who once nearly choked on their product out of sheer devotion, for something that suggests the company has grasped the scale of the offense. Four pieces of candy is not an apology. It is a rounding error wearing an apology’s clothes.
Still, I will give Bazooka this much. Their customer relations representative was unfailingly polite, and in this economy, in this world, a polite corporate email is not nothing. A $700 million dollar company did take the time to send something reducing their value to a $699.9999999999999999999999999 million dollar company.
Four Ring Pops.
I have received worse treatment from people who owed me considerably less than a lifetime of gum consumption. So I bear no real grudge, only a small, satisfied smile at having documented, for the record, one more case where the punishment did not remotely fit the crime, and where justice, once again, came in a very small package.
My grandson, for the record, will examine the candy and make his own choices as to whether or not they meet his standards. He has standards. He has principles. He may be onto something. He is, after all, my grandson.
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