The Price is Wrong, Bitch

I used to watch The Price is Right all the time with my grand­par­ents. It came on and still comes on at 11am, right when they’d eat lunch. Plinko was my favorite game, of course; my least favorite: Blank Check. Today in the Can­teen at work The Price is Right was on with Drew Carey and slight­ly mod­i­fied pro­duc­tion val­ues. Bark­er’s Beau­ties are long gone, replaced by even more pla­s­ticky-look­ing vapidi­ties; same old crap­py mer­chan­dise though.

The main epiphany that I had is the genius of the show itself. It gets peo­ple to watch a full hour of com­mer­cials in the guise of a game show. The Price is Right is the epit­o­me of Amer­i­can cap­i­tal­ism and con­sumerism. That it took a major change of cast to final­ly clue me into this fact is indica­tive of just how entrenched in that sys­tem I am. Yikes.

It might be a bit unfair to make the state­ment apply sole­ly to Amer­i­ca, as The Price is Right is inter­na­tion­al­ly pan­dem­ic. Amer­i­ca has always been good at export­ing cul­ture and enter­tain­ment.