I like this thread
1. Supermarkets that don't give consistent benchmarks - e.g. I'm looking at two packets of a product and one shows the "price per hundred grammes" on the label underneath the main price, but the second packet has the "price per kg" - it's a minor irk but it really bothers me for some reason!
2. Products advertised based on a tiny sample size of people - e.g. 73% of the eighty four people said that they liked it. Multinational cosmetic firms do this a lot - we should have a minimum of a thousand people questioned, and half of them given a "control sample" instead (e.g. a basic Tesco version) to eliminate the placebo effect
3. Convoluted journalism to avoid using trade marks - e.g. "he took to Twitter to say that..." rather than "he tweeted" - same with articles where journalists go to great lengths to avoid saying "googled" (in fact, the programmes where we see one of the characters using a fake search engine rather than just Google which 99% of searching is done on - it always feels a bit fake - e.g. you see a drama that's gone to great lengths to create a world that we can believe in, lots of attention to detail, but then we see the protagonist using "SearchWebDotCom" or something fake like that)
4. Current affairs programmes that try to generate headlines by getting on two people with unrepresentative extreme views from either side, so that we'll all be talking about the massive argument between Owen Jones and some wonk from the Institute Of Economic Affairs rather than getting a reasonable Labour MP and a reasonable Tory MP to discuss the practicalities of how to get legislation through parliament
5. The Marmite adverts. I don't mind a tiny amount of Marmite once or twice a year - it's okay - I don't really love it or hate it - but the advert seems to have kickstarted a world where people are increasingly taking the "love me or hate me, you can't ignore me" - there are a lot of attention seeking people who crave the love/hate thing - I really don't care enough about the edge lords and the controversialists who thrive on this stuff - I'm not going to spend my time watching the likes of Piers Morgan to find be enraged by his latest attempt to generate headlines by saying something deliberately provocative so that we'll all be talking about it around "water coolers" (in fact, I'd nominate "water cooler moments" too, since TV executives discovered the concept and started sticking things into their shows to get people talking)
6. The Innocent Smoothies adverts. Oh, so you're cleaning up the environment by flogging millions of single use plastic bottles are you? I get annoyed by Corporate Greenwash, but Innocent Smoothies seem to be the worst
7. People who go onto Room 101 and nominate things like wasps or traffic wardens - nobody "likes" these things - go on and have some properly weird opinions from time to time - the obscure things that wind people up are much more interesting (like some of the weird and wonderful things on this thread!)
ETA. 8. Articles that sound much more significant than they are. For example, one of the Sunday papers will have an article headed something like "Manchester United Boss Told To Spend £50m On New Goalkeeper" and people will think, gosh, is that the chairman's edict or the view of a fellow Premier League manager? Oh, no, it's the opinion of someone who played half a dozen games for the club in 1995 and is happy to say something controversial for the sake of £100 from the newspaper. Same with "Kier Starmer Told To Be More Bold On Economic Plans" - if that's the view of a former Labour Party leader or a member of the Shadow Cabinet then that's newsworthy - if that's the view of an obscure backbencher then it's really not news - especially if it's the view of someone who was always going to say that anyway - but the headline makes it sound much more important - grr!