Side Salad: Bottoms Up
August 18, 2026
Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.
That’s a wrap on no one’s drinking! I see some folks who are already taking a victory lap and saying SEE, WE KNEW GEN Z WAS DRINKING ALL ALONG, but I don’t think it’s time to fire up the ol’ back-patting machine (I’m indicting myself here, too, because I said this out loud a few weeks ago as well). But two things can co-exist at once. The NA market is sitting around $1 billion in value, and there’s genuinely an audience for that. The post-pandemic sobriety society is still going strong, but the NO ONE’S drinking narrative didn’t exactly ring true. Side tangent: I think marketers tend to get caught up in these very rigid ideas about generations, and while the times are always changing, I think people are mostly the same. Their attention goes from one thing to another. There will always be some new bright and shiny thing that will get our attention, and that goes for drinking, not drinking, and cutting back. Same as it ever was.
My kingdom for a hotdog scroller.
I still think this lawsuit is egregious af. Anywho, Rebel just filed for bankruptcy, but they’re appealing the trade dress lawsuit with Van Leeuwen.
Speaking of stupid trade dress lawsuits: Buc-ee’s, but make it They Live.
If you package your beverage in a plastic can, you are being willfully shitty. You can’t recycle these. You are not being clever. You are not “differentiating” on the shelf. Stop making them.
Here’s an absurd story—Amazon is buying up rare and OOP books, only to scan them, train their AI models on them, and then ultimately destroy them.
You’ve heard of crocodile tears, but what about crocodile beers?
Rudy and I have a thing for pumpkin spice season, and for more years than I care to count, we like to round up some of the weirdest CPG offerings from Uggs season. But I have to say, this year is feeling...weak. Where’s my pumpkin spice caviar and Dude Wipes? Please send me the new bright and shiny thing.
Incidentally, my wife and I had the most deranged, dance-heavy triple feature over the weekend and lived to tell the tale: Staying Alive, Flashdance, and Showgirls. Just six hours of pure gobbledygook and grade-A trash. FWIW, Staying Alive remains the absolute best Travolta movie, and you can’t tell me otherwise. What other movie has 12 montages and answers the question: what if we made an action movie about making it on Broadway, but instead of guns and nunchucks, we give the players tights and leg warmers?
Brown rice and vegetables for you all.
-Bill