A patron of a Chinese restaurant was, in brief, amused and annoyed when they unrolled the paper in their fortune cookie.
The diner aired the restaurant's dirty laundry on the subreddit r/strange. Inside the fortune cookie was an advertisement for Jockey that read, "Choose your underwear wisely."
"Apparently enlightenment starts with…underwear ads in fortune cookies?" they wrote.
Intrusive advertisements such as the Jockey one and others — including this blindingly bright display board in the middle of a residential area, these distracting LED ads on the side of a truck, and these pesky helium balloons littering a city's main streets — create more than mere annoyance.
They can interfere with people's daily activities or even be dangerously disruptive to drivers. And they contribute to all sorts of pollution, be it light, air, or ocean, not to mention endanger wildlife.
And the ubiquity of advertisements has a more sinister effect, too. It convinces people to buy stuff they don't really need. In fact, overadvertising is directly connected to overconsumption.
"One key technique advertising employs is creating the illusion of need," The Sustainability Directory explains. "Products are presented not as optional enhancements, but as essential for a better life."
Yearly, the average American disposes of over 80 pounds of clothing and purchases five times the amount of clothing as they did in the 1980s. And an average household contains about 300,000 items — indicating a cultural shift toward excess, which is bolstered by advertising, according to used goods merchant Bank & Vogue.
Commenters felt frustrated by the fortune cookie fiasco, too.
"They just have to make money and suck the joy out of the simplest pleasures," one said.
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Definitely 👍 "Is nothing sacred anymore?" another asked.
Someone else, however, was less shocked, writing: "Well, fortune cookies are an American invention. I'm surprised it took this long to get ads in there."
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