My occasional obsession with Lidl's packaging has been annoying me again this week. In particular, their apple juice:

What is it with Lidl's graphic design team that they can't afford to buy fruit? Their old grape juice carton used to have a huge pile of Photoshop cloned grapes on the front. The same few grapes repeated over and over again - though since posting about it last October the packaging has been changed and now has what looks like a real bunch of real grapes on the front - is this a coincidence? Probably, but I like to think someone in Herr Lidl's vast megabunker 'somewhere in Germany' read my blog and swung into action.

"Scheiß! Someone has noticed! Get me Helmut and a crack team of cheap graphic designers here at the double..."

So, to the apple juice carton. Five apples. Five juicy apples. But let's look a little closer... *

If you look at it for more than a few moments it's incredibly obvious that top left apple and bottom right apple are the same piece of fruit - possibly the same photo - just reversed with some semi-convincing drops of Freshness implying liquid painted in and a leaf slapped on in a place no apple leaf would ever grow in real life. Same for the other diagonal pairing, a different same apple** - reversed. I suspect the apple in the centre of the group is the same as the first one as well, it's just been shot from a different angle - but even if it isn't I find it hard to believe that Lidl's couldn't find more than three photogenic apples in the whole of Europe. Makes you wonder what the ones they are squishing up and putting in the cartons look like.

To stop myself going crazy thinking about this sort of thing (what else is there to do in Lidl's?) I took a look at the This Week's Offer bins. Aha! Cans of expanding polyurethane foam. Useful stuff - under the right circumstances. Cheap too. 'Squeasy' is a bit odd but what sold me on buying some was the label telling me I had '360º use of the can'. Brilliant! I hate only having 270º use of the can or even if you get really cheap shit from the Pound shop 90º use of the can. What really really sold me though, was the fact that in some part of Europe I have yet to identify, expanding polyurethane foam is known as 'pu-skum'.




* Ooh! Yes, let's!

** I know what I mean.