BUILDING A FIRST WORLD PHILIPPINES Top Filipino Corporations: Building a Slum-free, Squatter-Free Philippines is their Business. Really?!
I have previously written about this lengthily and felt the need for another one after having seen more posters added to the Seafood lobby harping on the same subject, further exposing their advertising folly and cheap gimmickry.
I did not want to think it’s typically Filipino to engage in cheap ridiculous claims like what Seafood city does. But I have not seen a ridiculous an advert as this one, blandished in various communities of the most progressive country in the world where homelessness is not apparent but real and made more so by the recent bursting of the real-estate bubble.
Reno, Nevada
As tent cities rise with alarming speed across the entire breadth of the land of milk and honey, Seafood city unstoppably builds dream homes in the sick man of Asia, single-handedly solving a social bane by retailing canned-sardines, lucky me noodles, tilapia and tocino.
Is there something about development that the industrialized nations do not know?
Obama is then best advised to hire Seafood city management to head his economic team.
The way this ad promotes Seafood city’s cause, the establishment appears to be the envy of the grocery business, the retail industry and every government trying to deliver basic social services to its people.
But a short trip to Seafood city will reveal how its pompous ad of lofty goals is a sorry cover for its own poor standard of retailing. Its brand is a far cry from the grocery leaders like Vons or Albertsons who make no pretensions or claims of solving homelessness in a country where bums have sleeping bags and backpacks.
Seafood city is like a lilliput in a land of the giants (in both literal and figurative senses), a kubo in a community of mansions, a talipapa in a sprawling shopping complex.
And they claim to save the motherland by providing roof over every kababayan’s heads, and delivering every component of a blissful life in every community.
Is Seafood city simply exaggerating or hopelessly hallucinating? Is it typical Filipino or a rare exception? I don’t know. But I know enough of our culture to say that it is not exactly uncommon.
They should get real, for a change.
See related article Have Seafood City, Will Prosper
