Happiness A Glass Half Empty

In an unremarkable business park of Ann Arbor, Michigan, stands a poignant memorial of some of man’s shattered dreams. It does not look like much from the outside though. Even, if one were to enter- which members of the public rarely do- it takes a few moments for your eyes to adjust to what you are seeing. It appears to be a vast and haphazardly organized supermarket; along every aisles, grey metal shelves are crammed with thousands of packages of food and household products. There is something unusually cacophous about the displays, and soon enough you work out the reason: there is only one of each product, unlike an ordinary supermarket. You won’t find many of them in a real supermarket either; they are failures, product withdrawn from sale after a few weeks or months, because almost nobody wanted to buy them. This storehouse- operated by a company called GIK custom research of America- has acquired the nickname “The Museum of Failed Products”.
It is almost certainly the only place where you can find Clarci’s a touch of yogurt shampoo, or the equally unpopular Gillete For Oily Hair Only, only few feet away from Pepsi A.M breakfast Cola. Remember any of those? No? Exactly.
The museum is consumer capitalism’s graveyard- the shadow side to our relentless upbeat success-focused culture of modern marketing. Many of the designers, salespeople and marketers who have found their way to the museum are surprised to products that their own companies had created, then abandoned. They were apparently so adverse to dwelling on the unpleasant business failure that they had neglected even to keep samples of their own disaster.
Failure is everywhere. It’s just that most of the time we’d rather avoid that fact. Our modern approaches to happiness and success are all based on the simple philosophy of focusing on things going well and in the right way. Our relentless effort to feel happy, or to achieve certain goals, is precisely what makes us miserable and sabotages our plans.