Just Label Us Skeptical

By Bruce McCall

Genetic tests indicate that 77% of fish sold as red snapper nationwide are other species illegally mislabeled as the popular entree, a new study has found. "It isn't dangerous," says Peter Gladding, a member of a consumer-awareness group, "just unfair." --USA Today

The simple trick of calling one thing something else is suddenly enriching the few, bamboozling the many and threatening the Western world's belief in the sanctity of the label. At a Times Square movie palace last week, patrons who shelled out $10 each to see a new Tom Cruise movie, only to get David Hasselhoff as the star instead, angrily rushed the box office to demand full refunds. The studio admitted saving millions with the celluloid bait-and-switch but denied shortchanging customers. "Hey, guy," noted a senior executive, "Tom and Dave are both adult male Americans with all their limbs and faculties intact. Both of 'em can talk and kiss and land a punch, am I right? Let's not split hairs!" And, he pointed out, the movie was two hours long and in surround sound and Technicolor, hallmarks of a Tom Cruise feature. "It's unfair," he summarized, "but come on, pal, it isn't dangerous."

Mislabeling has spread to taking the consumer's money for things that are supposed to happen but don't. Indignantly denounced by baseball fans as unfair if not dangerous--and really annoying as well--is the Philadelphia Phillies' alleged practice of selling seats in an empty home stadium when the team is on the road. "Paying steep admission prices simply to sit there watching the grass grow, with not even loud rock music or Diamond Vision by way of entertainment, is a new high in boredom, even for Philadelphia," carps one disgruntled Philliephile. Team executives maintain that the practice is entirely legitimate, pointing out that since nothing happens 90% of the time at an actual baseball game, and that the average fan is at a refreshment stand or in a rest room the other 10% of the time, there is no substantial difference in the experience whether a game is being played or not.

In an even more controversial instance, at least 53% of all U.S. high-fashion footwear manufacturers stand accused of marketing gloves as shoes and selling them at radically marked-up prices. A Footwear Council official's argument that "hands and feet are both five-digit extremities and both feel best wrapped in leather, so what difference does it make?" has been rejected by consumer advocates as a cynical manipulation of the facts. Fair Play for Footwear, the consumer group, points out that shoes made out of gloves fit badly and bunch up around the toes. "It isn't fair," says a Fair Play member, "and beyond that, it could be dangerous."

Mislabeling fish is one thing, but mislabeling land masses is quite another. Tipped off by a strange dearth of tropical vegetation and weather reports that predicted unseasonable cold for more than 300 consecutive days, thousands of tourists and retirees are up in arms after discovering that while they understood themselves to be in Florida, they were actually 3,000 miles north, in Greenland. Governor Jeb Bush's sheepish response--that Florida is just about full up, and that the rerouted human overflow will find the icebound island to be a spectacular vacation and sportsman's paradise if people remember to dress properly--has so far failed to mollify the complainants. A group of elderly condominium buyers are filing a class action after the condos in their gated community of Icicle Mews blew away in a violent storm--along with the gate.

Governor Bush's brother George W. faced serious credibility issues when it was disclosed that the animal he had described as his and wife Laura's new cat is actually a dog. Insiders claim that the President's mislabeling of his pet was the handiwork of White House political guru Karl Rove. With America's population of cat owners far exceeding that of dog owners, Rove is said to have advocated the nomenclatural switch as a slam-dunk means of expanding Bush's national support base in an election year. The President's insistence on patting his golden retriever and calling him a Siamese during a recent Larry King Live had alarmed even Republicans, but the revelation that it was "just election-year politics" has allowed Washington to breathe a sigh of relief. "I'm satisfied that the matter is neither unfair nor dangerous," pronounced former House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt, shortly before addressing the annual convention of the American Kennel Club on Franklin Delano Roosevelt's love of dogs.