Nutella orgies

One never knows when a riot will erupt. Well, sometimes you do. We’ve pretty much gotten used to seeing riots on Black Friday or when the Lakers win a championship. Soccer riots are so predictable they are now scheduled as part of the game. However, sometimes riots erupt due to systemic inequities in society. For instance, on 14 July 1789, the French people had finally had enough of the French monarchy and stormed the Bastille to fight for the Rights of Man.

On 25 January 2018, the noble French people once again resorted to violence to preserve the rights of man to have…uh, cheap nut spread. Yes, some marketing genius at a supermarket company called Intermarche, decided to slash prices on Nutella by 70 percent, prompting riots all over France as people scrambled to get a jar of the coveted nut spread.

Nutella is a spread made of hazelnuts and cocoa. After World War II, an Italian man named Pietro Ferrero invented the nut spread as a way to extend limited supplies of cocoa powder. He had plenty of hazelnuts, so he just mashed them up and added what little cocoa he had to make a chocolate-tasting spread to put on bread. Since then, Nutella has apparently become a mandatory part of the French diet. They consume about 100 million jars of this stuff each year. That’s a lot of nut spread.

When the supermarket chain announced the Nutella price discount, chaos erupted. One customer said, “They are like animals. A woman had her hair pulled, an elderly lady took a box on her head, another had a bloody hand.”

According to one supermarket employee who wishes to remain anonymous, “People just rushed in, shoving everyone, breaking things. It was like an orgy. We were on the verge of calling the police.”

The employee’s statement is very interesting. “Like an orgy,” he said. JUST WHAT KIND OF PERVERSIONS ARE THEY GETTING INTO IN FRANCE! No wonder Nutella is so popular. I guess we now know why they call it a nut spread.

I don’t remember reading anything similar about the French Revolution. Sure, there were lots of people getting their heads chopped off after Marie Antoinette said, “Let them eat cake.” Or, something like that. But, I don’t remember reading anything about cake frosting orgies.

To the credit of the Nutella company, they issued a statement condemning the actions of the supermarket chain that started the riots. “We wish to specify that this promotion was decided unilaterally by the brand Intermarché,” the statement read. “We deplore the consequences of this operation, which create confusion and disappointment in the minds of customers.”

Of course, the Nutella company immediately began ramping up nut spread production to cash in on the “confusion and disappointment” of the Nutella-addicted masses. They also canceled all their advertisements for the year since the international news media was now doing that for them for free.

The truly scary thing about this whole episode is that France is only the world’s second-biggest consumer of Nutella. The biggest consumer is Germany. No wonder the French Ministry of Economy and Finance had an emergency meeting. They aren’t worried about supermarket riots; they’re worried about another German invasion. The Germans are probably already forming up their tank battalions ready to smash through the Maginot Line once again. All the Germans need to do is figure out how to run Panzer tanks on wind and solar power.

Silly Europeans, rioting over silly stuff like nut spread. We Americans riot about important stuff, like if the Patriots win another Super Bowl…