OK, not really hate, although I don’t particularly care for it. The whole appeal of Cici’s pizza is that it is all-you-can-eat, and I never eat very much at one sitting, and I would rather get a limited amount of good food than an unlimited amount of mediocre food.
That’s not my real issue though. I may not hate the place, but I HAAAAAATE the commercial. It goes like this: A woman stands at the buffet. The camera pans down the length of the table, and the announcer says something like “The endless pizza buffet! A cheesy wonderland of deliciousity” Close-up on the woman, who is looking at the pizza longingly. As soon as the camera hits her face, she gets an ashamed expression on her face and looks away “But not for you. You shower with a loofah. Your indulgence: the salad bar. You are a delicate flower.” Show woman placing one tiny tomato on top of a pile of iceberg lettuce, then walking over to the pizza with a sheepish look and quickly getting a piece of pizza, then a second piece, while the announcer sputters with both pieces. Then, she gets a piece of desert bread, and the announcer stops dead and says “wow, that’s my kind of flower”. On to the normal Cici’s commercial ending. The last shot is of the woman shoving a huge piece of desert bread in her mouth and looking around shamefully.
I understand the concept of aspiration marketing, and that by making something look a little forbidden the company is hoping to sell more mediocre pizza. But there are so many things wrong with this ad that it makes me want to smash the TV. The offenses, in order from least problematic to really, really hideous…
1. What the hell does showering with a loofah have to do with anything?
2. In a developed country, a salad bar is not an indulgence, particularly one that features iceberg lettuce and cherry tomatoes. Iceberg lettuce has zero nutritional value, thus its extreme cheapness, thus its prevalence on every cheap salad bar in the world. If your salad bar features unlimited truffles (the fungus kind, not chocolate) and Russian caviar, then you can call it indulgent.
3. The SHAME! It runs rampant through the whole ad. The shifty eyes as the woman gets her pizza, the fact that she goes so much faster there so as to not be seen…it’s ridiculous. She is an adult woman. If she wants pizza, she should eat pizza, and there is no reason she should be ashamed of it except for our misguided cultural prejudice against women eating any real food.
4. The SHOCK! The announcer conveys, with no doubt, a desperate surprise that she would actually eat! At a buffet! The thought! The reality is, she doesn’t even have very much food. A little tiny salad, two small pieces of pizza, and a smallish chunk of dessert bread. The plate looks all piled up because the plate is teeny, not because she has some ginormous amount of food. Sure, it’s bigger than the palm of her hand, but so is the average grapefruit.
5. The face stuffing at the end, accompanied by more shame. I hate the implication that anyone who would dare eat dessert would of course also shove it in their face as much at a time as possible.
6. The misogyny. They would have never done this commercial with a man or teenage boy, because we as a culture expect them to eat real food. It is only women who must be “delicate flowers” and eat nothing, particularly in public.
7. The reinforcement. I bet most people never think about what this commercial is really saying (a woman eating pizza at a pizza buffet may eat but will, of course, be very ashamed of herself for doing it) becuase those ideas are so ingrained in most if us. What woman hasn’t gone to a buffet, or ordered off a menu, and looked around to see if anyone sees her? Just the other day I was in a restaurant and knew exactly what I wanted, but hesitated because I knew it was a lot of food. I also knew I would be taking most of it home, which was part of the appeal, but I experienced definite ordering shame, as if I should not get what I wanted because other people would look at me and think “Look at the fatty and all that food!”. Fortunately, I also knew that guilt was conditioned and not logical or rational, so I got over it and ordered the fajitas. They were delicious. It makes me sad to think of how many people aren’t eating what they want, or what they need, because of the cultural beliefs espoused again by this and other commercials like it. Whether we are aware of it or not, the messages we hear affect us, and they just get stronger as they are repeated, particularly in seemingly innocuous forms like this one.
I think maybe I hate Cici’s after all.
My Improvisational Life 