World's Finest Chocolate

What really gets the goat of discerning internet users is when someone or some company unilaterally decides he or she or it or they is or are the best and advertises that way. For instance, when you seek an online service, you read up on the service, the company, its history, its pricing its reputation. But should you believe the text you read at the site, considering it was written by someone affiliated (even though it’s written in third person)? Do you believe that that online home schooling school is the leading school in the world? Do you bite like a hungry fish when the research company says they are reputedly the best of its type? When you see “world’s finest chocolate,” do you say, “well, then, I will only buy from them from now on”?

Or do you, the careful consumer, investigate further, reading the reports and reviews of consumers who decide what is the world’s finest chocolate or the best school in the western hemisphere? I suspect it is the latter, so I would like to add my reports of that company that calls itself World’s Finest Chocolate.

I am, like many of you, a chocolate fiend. I know some about the chemical cause and effect (in the hypothalamus and pituitary gland, chocolate acts on the dopamine and serotonin levels and all that); I live on chocolate as a staple; I have sold chocolate for fundraisers at the school where I worked; I have made my own hand rolled and triple-dipped chocolates; etc. etc.. I know what works for me and the people around me, that is.

I also worked—during those gruesome grad school days—for an incentive sales company, which supplied the incentive prizes and products for local businesses and fundraising product companies, and also provided all the newspaper supplies (newspaper boxes, rubber bands, bags, etc.) to every paper in the United States. One of the fundraising product customers at the company was World’s Finest Chocolate.

Yeah, right, I thought, the first day I filled an order. Then I met the CEO of the west coast, who was one of the classiest, prettiest, and most generous women I have yet to meet. After each interaction or exchange with our company, she would leave “samples”, enough for the whole company. That chocolate was coveted, salivated over, and much anticipated. That chocolate did in fact live up to its name: it was [some of] the world’s finest chocolate we ever enjoyed. And we have the famous See’s Candy here on the west coast, which is pretty damned hard to out-do.

So now I have to take back my complaint that every company that claims it is the best is full of it…. Not every company, just those who haven’t yet proven themselves. In other words, when they had been online for two months, they were saying they were, sadly, the best of a rare breed of companies. The best? You haven’t even been born yet! Share your wares first, THEN get the bragging started.