"Market Research: Your Opinion Counts"

No joke. That's what it said. Capital letters and everything.

Direct marketing at 7:30am is a chastening experience. The deceptively demure lady with the bright-red name badge ("Lynn" — of course) thrust the pitiful scrap of tick-boxed paper into my hand and promptly scurried off, leaving me aghast and dressing-gowned on my own doorstep.

Aghast and dressing-gowned is never a good look. One resembles a songless, age-embittered Baloo caught having a particularly nasty dump.

"Your Opinion Counts."

Too fucking right it does. It counts in terms of pure, unleavened, dirty cash: the net fiscal yield that a monolithic, soul-munching company can dishonestly squeeze from all the aggregated, synthesised "opinions" they have garnerned — via doorstepping mercenaries like Lynn — from irked Baloos such as myself.

Your opinion counts all right.

Barefaced rhetorical sloganism is alive and well in this society, in all sorts of familiar places. One can imagine with little effort a white-and-blue striped titanium bunker two hundred feet below the ground, in which Tesco Uberfuhrers begin each and every board meeting by rubbing their hands and simply repeating the words: "Every Little Helps".

As the sound of the infectious triptych reverberates across the unfathomably large table, sniggers begin to ripple from thin, cruel mouths, rising maniacally to a crescendo of cracked, howling laughter, while overhead a series of gargantuan glass coffers rattle with a thundering torrent of incoming notes and coins. A piercing symphony of insidious, brazen cheek.

Every little helps? Damn straight.

Pure, evil genius.