Dialogue #3 + Explanation
Nov 26th, 2011 by sarahkeller
Characters:
- Customer in the first dialogue: A customer wanting fair trade green tea.
- Clerk in the first and second narratives: Interested more in a sale than the products being sold.
- Customer in the second dialogue: Wants to fix the information on a tea label.
Setting:
- Vancouver, Canada
- Present day
- Select Tea Shops (unnamed)
Point of the Dialogue:
- Nowadays sales often beat out quality and truth in the mind of corporations trying to sell tea for it’s “healthy properties.”
Customer: Do you have any the fair-trade green tea at this shop?
Clerk: Why yes, we do. Would you like a high grade fair-trade tea full of natural antioxidants like Xi Hu Long Jing, or the normal grade, which has antioxidants, but if you’ll notice, it’s a much less flavorful tea. Not as dark, with older leaves, and not as flavorful.
Customer: And where are these teas from?
Clerk: Well, the Xi Hu Long Jing tea was imported from the Hangzhou region of the Zhejiang province in China, and has been grown there for generations. But to tell you the truth, the normal grade tea is from Indonesia. Grown fast because of the heat there.
Customer: But it has less antioxidants, you say?
Clerk: Yes, but it’s much cheaper. Seven dollars for fifty grams.
Customer: And how about the one from China?
Clerk: Thirty-eight dollars for fifty grams. It is the real deal after all, and studies have proven that it’s much healthier. If you really want a good offer, try the non-fair-trade green tea. It’s two dollars and fifty cents for fifty grams.
Customer: But it’s not fair trade.
Clerk: But it still has antioxidants.
Customer: But not as many as the Chinese stuff, right?
Clerk: Nope, so you’re much better going with the full leaf, fair-trade, Chinese green tea.
Customer: Fine. Fifty grams of the high grade Chinese.
Clerk:Your healthy body will thank you for it.Part 2: A True Story
Customer: Excuse me.
Clerk: How can I help you?
Customer: Do you realize that one of the labels on your teas is inaccurate?
Clerk: Which one?
Customer: Your Walnut Green Tea. It says that in Traditional Chinese Medicine the walnut is seen as a warming food, which is true, but green tea supposedly has cooling effects, so it doesn’t make sense that the two would be warming when used together.
Clerk: But you drink green tea warm, right? And it’s cold in Vancouver, so wouldn’t a hot cup of tea warm you?
Customer: But you can say that about any hot liquid, and besides, the idea is that the walnuts are supposed to warm you, not the liquid its self. It says so on the label.
Clerk: Huh, well I didn’t know that. Thanks for the information.
Customer to another customer: I have a funny feeling that the information is never going to get to their head office, and if it did they wouldn’t care.
[Exit- Customer]
The last two-part dialogue was written to make the point that many modern tea merchants care more about getting a sale than the quality of their product, or whether their product does what it says it does on the label. People still drink tea for its healthful qualities, but when merchants care about their profits more than their merchandise and interpret tea’s healthful qualities wrongly, fraudulent information is distributed to the public. I made one dialogue with a clerk who is truthful about where the different teas in her shop are from, and one clerk who does not know very much about the product being sold. The first dialogue specifically points out that there are many teas claiming to be antioxidant rich, but there are different grades of tea, and no ordinary tea bag is even close to as beneficial to ones health as full leaf, high-grade tea. The second dialogue is a true story that happened at David’s Tea on West 4th avenue. It turns out that their Toasted Walnut Green Tea is labeled wrongly, stating that according to “Traditional Chinese Medicine” the walnuts in it should give the tea warming qualities, when the tea itself has cooling qualities. Recently I’ve found more examples of problems with the labels on their products having to do with claims from “TCM,” but none are as noteworthy as the walnut tea.