Today I discovered in Piazza Repubblica there is a Mercedes merchandise shop, just next to the famous Giubbe Rosse restaurant. There is one car inside, but they don’t sell cars. They only sell shirts, jackets, and all kind of clothes. Ok, Mercedes is good at making cars, but so what? They have absolutely no clue on how to make shirts! Why should they do?

Welcome to the wonderful world of brand brand companies, that is, companies that instead of selling their products just approve their brand to be used on top of unknown 3rd party products. So today you can buy Mercedes shirts, tomorrow you will buy Lacoste ringtones and within next year you will see Dada cars. And all the three products will be produced in some 3rd world country, with workers payd few euros per day.  You can read all the story in No Logo, a very interesting book written by Canadian journalist Naomi Klein.
Even if this way of doing business is a already common in US, so far Italy seemed to be immune to this non-sense.  I mean, Italian consumer looked smarter.  For example, last year (almost) everyone laughed at FIAT shirts.  Now I’m starting to lose my hope.

Something is going really wrong in this world.