“Nice Stetson, pardner.”
If this statement brings to mind the image of a hat, you’re hopelessly out of date in the brand department. This particular Stetson is a pair of eyeglass frames which I purchased last week. They haven’t arrived yet because the manufacturer has to fit some glass in the frames.
I didn’t set out looking for a Stetson when my old glasses broke. In fact, I was only barely aware that eyeglasses had brands. Sure, the expensive ones had names one them, but I thought that was to identify them in case they were lost: “Attention please, will Ralph Lauren come to the counter? His eyeglasses have been found.” My wife wised me up to all the designer names, but I wasn’t aware that a former Western hat manufacturer had gone into the eyeglass frame business.
I have a Stetson hat in the closet, the one my grandfather wore for many years. It’s gray and crumpled and too small for me, but I keep it around as a reminder of the time when a Stetson was a Stetson. Grandpa wore glasses, but they weren’t Stetsons. He would have laughed at Stetson eyeglasses and put them on his head, where a Stetson belongs. It’s probably best that he’s gone, he would have found modern life too confusing.
All our dependable old brands have been scrambled so we don’t know what they go to anymore. There was a time when a Caterpillar was a huge piece of heavy equipment; now it could just as well be a pair of boots on display at Fred Meyer. A few years ago when we thought of Jeep, we’d think of four-wheeling. Now, there’s a Jeep survival knife for sale at Big 5. The fabled Winchester brand has met a similar sad fate. Once the rifle that symbolized the Old West, the Winchester of today is more likely to be a cheap knife cranked out by some Chinese factory.
Somebody’s buying up all these beloved brands from broke or failing American companies and sticking them on Chinese-made products, because we recognize those brands. Chances are I wouldn’t buy a pair of Chinese glasses with a Chinese name, because they’d seem foreign to me. The brand snatchers deserve some creative credit for making the new item vaguely similar in use to the original item: Stetson go on head, eyeglasses go on head, we’ll call them Stetson; Jeep go in mud, survivalists go in mud, we’ll call knife Jeep: Winchester kill people, sharp blades kill people, we’ll call knife Winchester. Chances are you won’t see the Caterpillar brand on a pair of fuzzy slippers.
A fun parlor game is to identify faltering U.S. brands and guess what their names will be plastered on in a few years. Our car companies are all failing but don’t despair, in the future we’ll still have the brands: Ford skateboards, Chevrolet scooters and Chrysler bicycles, all on sale at Toys R Us.
And we’ll always live in the USA, even if it is under foreign ownership.
