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
