Welcome to product placement hell

I grew up on the Anne of Green Gables books (the miniseries are NO comparison), and one of my favorites was Anne of the Island, about Anne's college years. One thing in it puzzled me, though, when I was a kid: the part where Anne writes a story, and a friend of hers secretly takes it and works in a couple of plugs for baking powder so that the story can win a contest. Anne's distress over this made no sense to me. I simply didn't understand what was so awful about advertising a product in a story.

Now that I'm grown up, I understand. Unfortunately, most of the grown-ups who make their living writing stories do not.