True Argentine Facts (No. 2)

"Ace" is a brand of laundry detergent sold in Argentina. After flying home on one of my college breaks, I noticed that the logo reminded me of something. Oh yeah. It looks EXACTLY like a friggin' bottle of Tide.

I asked around a little and found out two things. One is that the brand is pronounced Ah-Say, as in the first two syllables of "a sailor went to sea-sea-sea." Two is that Ace is a fairly ill-reputed brand, the cheapest of laundry detergents, reserved for extremely thrifty or impoverished housewives.

I dismissed Ace as a the cleaning equivalent of a Chinese electronics knockoff and continued with my life.

And but then my wonderful sister Malaria, who is not actually malaria-ridden, quit her oppressive job at Argentina's largest television news network and jumped on board with the local subsidiary of a certain bathroom-and-cleaning-products-multinational that makes everything currently in your medicine cabinet/Lazy Susan/pockets, from razor blades to fratty deodorant and body wash to crunchy potato chips to minty toothpaste to, wouldn't you know it, Tide laundry detergent. I was thus forced to refloat the Ace question.

"Do you know there's this detergent brand named Ace that's totally ripping off the Tide logo? Does your company care?" I asked her.

"Uh, yeah," she said. "We make it."

Malaria explained that as this giant multinational entered the Argentine market, they saw it fit to change Tide's name and market it as a low-cost alternative to all those other premium detergents. That makes no sense, I argued. I bet everyone would buy Tide, if they left the original brand name and hiked the price and advertised it as the choice of North America. After all, thousands of confused Argentines spend more than 6 dollars a meal at McDonald's every day (McDonald's having successfully positioned itself as a high-class eatery here, a phenomenon I might address someday but not right now).

Malaria said she'd think it over, which is our own special little code for "leave me alone." The point is, I got to the bottom of this shady business. Argentine fact: There is a brand of detergent that looks like Tide, smells like Tide, has Tide's logo, is sold by the parent company of Tide, and yet is named Ace and is significantly cheaper than Tide and is universally derided. Strange shit, my friends. Strange shit.