LIVING IN CIN BY JAY GILBERT
My P&G Soap Opera
CINCINNATI’S BLUEBLOODS CAME TO ME FOR HELP WITH A NEW PRODUCT. IT WENT WELL AT FIRST. I ONCE WALKED AMONG THE PROCTOIDS. DON’T WORRY, MY EXPOSURE LEFT NO LASTING damage. For those unfamiliar with the term, Proctoid was a pejorative nickname for the typical Procter & Gamble conformist robot. That reputation has since faded, but P&G shouldered it for most of the 20th century—a rigid code of rigid work methods, rigid dress, and rigid hair. Much of corporate America was this way back then, but Procter & Gamble just had to be No. 1, didn’t it? If a can of Pringles showed how potatoes could be compressed into a nested stack of identical pretend-chips, P&G showed how employees could be compressed into a nested stack of identical pretend-humans. This stereotype was already in decline when a ray from the Proctoid phaser first grazed me. Fortunately, I was mostly unaffected because I never had been an actual Procter & 2 8 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E . C O M A P R I L 2 0 2 2
Gamble employee; I merely provided freelance writing and music for some of their brands during the 1980s and ’90s. Just to be safe, I still wore a sport jacket and tie whenever I’d visit the Dolly Parton Towers (a name many locals gave the P&G buildings downtown at Fifth Street and Broadway). MY STORY BEGINS, OF COURSE, WITH soap. Procter & Gamble’s world conquest owes everything to soap. In periods of growth they expanded into things like peanut butter and coffee, and during the overreach years even stationery and batteries, but whenever times required belt-tightening and brand selloffs the soaps stayed. P&G was unbeatable there. Well, there was that time a tiny Minnesota company blindsided the entire industry with the first liquid soap in a pump PH OTO G R A PH BY D E V Y N G LI S TA
