Nostalgic post

Have you noticed the return of No Name's original package design? I was grocery shopping the other day and there was no mistaking it: Don Watt's iconic boxes of yellow and black are back.

I guess the re-branding is meant to refocus consumers' attention to the simplicity and low cost of No Name products. I picked up a carton of crackers and the change was striking. All colors, images, pizazz: gone. I suppose it's not a bad way to lure increasingly frugal shoppers in today's ever-sinking economy. If it looks cheap, thinks the financially-strapped consumer, then I must be saving money.

But for reasons unrelated to the state of the economy, it warms my heart to see the return of black Helvetian text on fields of yellow. It reminds me of my childhood.

I grew up across the street from a No Frills store. (I believe it was Scott's, but who the Hell cares.) I was fascinated by it. It was just a giant yellow brick prism that I could stare at from our living room window.

"What does "frills" mean?" I recall asking my mother. She told me something about pleating on dresses. I didn't get it.

Saturday afternoon we would trek to the grocery store. My mother would unfold her grocery cart and take me by the hand, and we'd cross the busy street, pass through the seemingly magic automatic doors, walk past the musical coin-op pony, where my feet would drag and my mother would insist "come-on", and then through the turnstile, and into a land of savings. Signs proclaimed that No Frills would not be beat on an assortment of staples, and I believed them.

And though I actually didn't enjoy nor participate in the shopping, I loved No Name products. Not only did the boxes match the intense nuclear yellow of the store façade, but the bold, black print on the boxes was entrancing. My young mind (then devouring a solid six hours a day of television) understood the concept of marketing and I could not ignore the extraordinary purity of the descriptive labels. No Name described their contents in way that none of their neighbours on the shelves did; with banal and pristine accuracy: "Bran Cereal", "Unsweetened Orange Juice", "Frozen Peas", "Women's Pantyhose".

There were no marketing euphemisms, no advertising slogans, no misleading imagery, no jazz, no frills, nothing. Nothing beyond a rote description in our two national languages.

To me, No Name represented the promise a very simple and accessible world. A world where one walks into a perfectly yellow cube, fills a cart with smaller geometric solids, equally yellow and accordingly labeled, pays, and leaves. A world with no brands, but only goods cherished for their intrinsic value. Where consumerism means nothing more than picking the cube that suits your needs and leaving the store. A world only a child could treasure really. Uncomplicated and serene. And bright fucking yellow.

(My fantasy has a certain communist charm to it, I'll admit. But I'm not a pinko.)

Eventually, as the Neon '90s gained momentum, the No Name non-brand ethos became a brand itself, and irony died of a coughing fit. The pseudo-Soviet curves of black Helvetica melted into script and serifs. Other (non-yellow) colours and pictures(!) crept on to the packaging, and No Name because indistinguishable from other store brands. Somehow in trying to become less generic, No Name became generic completely.

In an economy overrun with options, preferences, personalization and selection, it's refreshing to see simplicity return to the grocery shelves. But oddly, while they might be the only honest form of advertising in the store, to me, they also represent a lie I've held on to since childhood. Namely, the manifestation of a false utopia, simplistic, and saffron, and shielded from the vagaries of the free market.