Collecting American Consumerism

Wow. Check THIS out. A market research company called GfK Custom Research North America is amassing a major stockpile of American consumer goods under the guise of it being a useful tool for designers and researchers. They say:

Imagine a physical collection of packaged goods that spans decades of consumer marketing and provides real world examples of past and current offerings. A collection that reflects tracking trends across 300+ global product categories, and is the result of procuring items from essentially every product in food, beverage, household, health & beauty care, baby care, pet products, etc.

But I think we really know what’s going on here. Anybody else catch a whiff of an “end of days” cult in those non-refrigerated eggs? The Collection boasts 110,000 pieces, some dating back to the 1960s (hope those are the non-perishables), and it’s pretty much invite-only. I wonder where they keep the Kool Aid?

Gfk does provide what they call an “interactive tour” of the premises here, but it’s not very comprehensive, and I don’t see anything really mind-blowing. To be totally honest, I’ve seen more impressively curated collections of food and household products on Extreme Couponing. Someone with a taste for OCD art needs to step in and organize those shelves by date, size, color…just something.

[via CoDesign]