The Rest of the Story (in my best Paul Harvey impersonation)

 Yesterday at Target:

K:  Wait here.  I need to get some wrapping paper.  I'll be right back.

15 minutes later...

ME:  Ah, there you are.  What's taking so long?  How hard can this be?

K:  *sigh*  Men!

ME:  Get this roll.  It looks like it has a lot of paper on it.

K:  No.  The quality isn't right.

ME:  Quality?  What quality?  Who cares...it's disposable.

K:  I'm not sure what color to get.

ME:  DUH!  It's Christmas...get red or green, or red AND green.

K:  *sigh*  Men!

I'm not 100% for sure, but I suspect the same guy who was behind Valentine's, Halloween, and the ever popular Mother's/Father's Day invented wrapping paper, too.  He was a marketing GENIUS!  He shouldn't just be IN the Marketing Hall of Fame, his name should be ON the building!

Think about it....Valentine's:  The flower growers had nothing to do after the Rose Parade floats were built.  All their greenhouses were empty, but capitalism being what it is, they wanted to make better use of their now-idle assets, so they hired a guy to dream up a holiday that would be "flower heavy".  Hence, Valentine's.  It was a totally made up event.

Halloween:  Already gloating over how well his Valentine's promotion had gone over, he approached the candy makers and pitched to them a holiday that would move a lot of candy.  They bit (pardon the pun), and sensing an easy double-dip commission, he pitched the same thing to the costume industry, too.

Mother's/Father's Day:  Hallmark called him and said, "Hey, we want some", and Wah-Lah, greeting card sales quintupled.  Cha-ching!

The wallpaper industry has suffered through innumerable booms and busts.  Wallpaper's popularity goes up and down like women's hemlines.  Grabbing at straws, looking for anything that could give them some stability, they called the guy.

"Help!  We've got a warehouse full of cheap-ass wallpaper we can't move.  We need a holiday.  Quick."

He said, "A holiday.  Just A holiday?  I can make EVERY day a holiday for you guys.  Instead of just handing mom a pot holder or dad a tie, we'll make 'em wrap their gift with your crappy wallpaper.  But we'll call it 'Gift Wrap Paper'.  It sounds much classier.  Whatdaya think?"

"And check this", he added.  "You can wrap just a couple of feet of your crummy wallpaper...er...Gift Wrap Paper...around an over-sized cardboard spool and sell it for ten-times the price!"

GENIUS!

And that's where Gift Wrap Paper came from.

Now you know The Rest of the Story.  :)

S

"But daaaaad, all the other kids have one. I need one, too. Pleeeeeze?"

OK, I readily admit I'm not a techie.  I hear about new gadgets every day that can do things that don't need doing and wonder, "Why?"  And then I get trampled by the stampede of people rushing to buy these gadgets that do things that don't need doing.  Go figure.

It seems to me the gizmo makers are really scratching their butts these days trying to figure out how to sell people "new and improved" versions of things they already have that are so new they're still in warranty.  Their latest ploy:  Cellphones with curved screens.

"Dad, come check this out....it has a curved screen!"

"Oh dear gawd.  What have you done now?  You sat on it, didn't you?  If I've told you once I've told you a thousand times, don't put your phone in your back pocket.  You'll sit on it and break it."

"No dad.  It's new.  I bought it this way.  It's already pre-sat on....er....broken....er....curved."

"Please tell me you got it off the 'defective / gently used' shelf.  I mean, it IS broken."

"No, it isn't broken.  It's supposed to be this way."

"You paid full price for it that way?"

"Full price?  No!  I paid a premium.  Innit cool?"

"No, it isn't 'cool'.  You got screwed.  You bought a used phone that overheated and partially melted!"

"But it came this way from the factory."

"Bullshit.  If it came from the factory like that, they have a serious quality control problem."

*sigh*  "I read about it in Gizmo Today.  LG has been developing this technology for 3 years."

"No, LG has been dreaming up this story ever since a whole load of their cell phones got hot and warped on the boat ride over."

 

In my day we called it "putting lipstick on a pig."

I don't get it.

My advice:  Buy LG stock.  Lots of it.  Now.  This is gonna be BIG!  :)

S

You do the crime, you do the time. Say 'hey' to your new roomie, Bubba.

I'm guessing one of my neighbors hasn't yet mastered the fine art of microwave popcorn.

Last night around 8 we heard a crash and looked out to see a 2-car wreck right outside our terrace.  I called 911 to report no injuries, but that cops and a wrecker were needed.  Within seconds we had 3 fire trucks, 3 cops, and an ambulance swarming all over us.  Turns out they were already on their way to a fire call at our apartments, and the fender bender was just a bonus.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It seems the new "in" major at university business schools is Grand Larceny.  Management, Marketing, Accounting, and all the rest are now so blase.  Now "GL" is where it's at.

It has become a daily occurrence for one company or another to admit to doing something illegal and being fined millions....BILLIONS of dollars, even.  Yesterday SAC Capital was fined $1.8B for insider trading, in addition to the $616M they were fined earlier in the year.  

BP was recently tapped for $4B, GlaxoSmithKline was fined $3B, and even Johnson & Johnson, the baby powder maker (and pharmaceutical company) was fined $2.2B for urging doctors to prescribe some of their meds to treat ailments the FDA hadn't approved them for.  And of course JPMorgan Chase has agreed to a $13B settlement related to mortgage fraud, and billions more have been paid for interest rate rigging by all the world's major banks.  And there are plenty more I could mention, too, but I don't want to write all day.

I'm a staunch capitalists.  "Profit" is a good word.  But damn, people, doesn't anyone know how to make money without ripping someone else off in the process?  Seems to me we'll continue to have problems like these until we start playing hardball with them.  

Let's turn some pinstripes into jail stripes.  And/or maybe shutting down and breaking up companies who are serial offenders.  Talk about some pissed off stockholders!  Maybe then they won't be so insistent on demanding every last penny profit they can by any means possible, legal or not.

Only when the crime costs more than the potential profit will Management be a more desirable degree than Grand Larceny.  

S

What I learned from K about grocery shopping....

....she can't do it.  She wants one of everything.  She was almost trembling with excitement she was so overwhelmed with the grocery shopping experience last night.


I usually do the  grocery shopping by myself.  Years ago my ex told me I could either do that or stay home on Saturdays with 3 kids while she did the shopping.  DUH!  No brainer.  Over the years I developed a system; I made a map of our preferred grocery store by aisle listing those things that we regularly buy.  Aisle 1 might be salad dressing, mayo, mustard, ketchup, etc.  I keep this map/list in the kitchen and as we see we're running short of something we circle it on the list.  I go in the door of the store, up and down each aisle in order with my list, get what I need, and end up back at the checkout and out the door.  Wham, bam, thank you ma'am.  30 minutes, tops.


I normally go on Thursday afternoon on my way home after work.  Things were hectic at work this Thursday and I couldn't keep to my schedule, so K and I went together after our dinner out last night.  BIG MISTAKE!  I've learned she's a major compulsive shopper.  She's a sucker for "end caps", those places on the ends of each aisle where you turn the corner.  People's eyes go right to that spot and they often buy whatever's there, whether they need it or not.  She was possessed, I tell ya!  They need to rename them "K caps".   


Bottom line, it cost us about 20% more last night because K just had to have things she saw she couldn't live without.  I'm sure they'll use the store video surveillance camera footage in marketing classes for years to come, and re-write marketing textbooks, too.  The "K" effect, they'll call it.

Next week, I'm goin' it alone.


S

Marketing gone terribly wrong

I remember one cold winter day a few years ago I went looking for my gloves and couldn't find them.  Just buy some new ones....simple fix, right?  Au contraire.  I found that most department stores had already put away their gloves, in fact nearly all their winter stuff, and replaced them with bathing suits and other warm-weather items.  

That makes no sense to me.  Why would you want to buy something you couldn't wear for 5 or 6 months? I buy something now, I wear it now.  My spousal unit, of course, saw this as making perfect sense.  You buy winter long johns and down jackets in July, and bathing suits in January, she said.  Huh? She explained stores want to get the jump on their competitors so they begin showing their "pre-season" stuff earlier and earlier each year.  I'm thinking eventually they're going to get a full year ahead of themselves, meaning they'll have next winter's gloves on sale this winter.  I wish they'd hurry.  Then my world can be right again.

And stores/malls always seem to put up their Christmas decorations earlier and earlier, too.  They're showing us snow scenes and we're still mowing the yard!  Actually, this year they were up before Halloween.  Jeez!  Everyone except Nordstroms, that is.  Nordstroms has said they would not decorate their stores for Christmas until after Thanksgiving?  They say they want to celebrate one season at a time.  At last, some sanity.  Good for ya, Nordstroms!  

S