A New Era

Over the years in this space I have brought you stories about products and services that appear to be hoaxes, and some that I can only wish were not. I’m not naïve enough to believe that PenguinWarehouse.com was ever a real business, or crazy enough to try keeping a live penguin as a pet if it was, but I was deeply disappointed to learn that the service purporting to send people you don’t like a box of elephant droppings was a hoax, and quite cheered to learn that the company that will send people you don’t like a selection of obscenely-shaped greeting cards was real. Now, however, the Salon.com website has brought us the story of what may be the new winner in this category, which if true has the potential to usher in a new era of Internet-based pranks…

I’ve never actually heard anyone use the obscenity “Eat a Bag of Dicks” (hereinafter EABOD) outside of cyberspace; it seems to be common on certain discussion boards, in occasional comments sections, and of course in online chat over video game networks, but I can’t recall anyone actually shouting it in public except as a reference to one of the above cyber interactions. However, according to the Salon article, it would appear that there is a new company calling itself “Dicks by Mail” that will send your specified recipient a large bag of gummy candy in the shape of male genitalia, along with a gift card containing the aforementioned EADOB invective. The company is promising complete anonymity, although I suppose that if you wanted the recipient to know that you had sent them a bag of obscenely-shaped candy you could always arrange to have it sent to your own address and then add a more personalized message…

Now, clearly this isn’t a serious product or a serious service. If all you want is to insult someone, with or without the use of obscenity, there are far more convenient, cost-effective, and untraceable ways to do that. For that matter, if your recipient really likes gummy candy and isn’t particularly fussy about what shape said candy is in, they might not actually mind receiving such a package. The company insists that its product and service are not intended to bully or threaten anyone, and that they will not be party to any such actions if they find out what their customer is up to, stating that anyone who would use this service to do actual harm should in fact EABOD themselves…

How this will work out in the long run I can’t imagine. There has always been a small but devoted market for obscenely-shaped candy and pastry, including offers made over the Internet during the last few years to supply chocolate models of parts of the sender’s anatomy that would not normally be something you would show to another person, let alone make a mold from and cast in chocolate. None of these companies has precipitated the collapse of our civilization, or indeed ever risen above the level of somewhat risqué novelty products, and it seems likely that even within the culture of Internet gamers no one is likely to take the EABOD offering all that seriously…

On the other hand, as e-commerce continues to develop there will be fewer and fewer limitations on the products that can be manufactured, sold and shipped from websites, and we should probably note that there are concepts which are common online that could lead to consumer products that would be even more disturbing than the EABOD product referenced in the linked story. If this venture proves to be economically successful I would fully expect that you will be able to economically and untraceably send people whom you do not like a whole range of insulting, embarrassing, or simply disgusting products within a few years…

This would, in fact, be a new era in both e-commerce and Internet communications. Just not in a good way…

Seriously?

Every once in a while the tone of this blog will get much darker than I really like, and I will end up reminding my readers (assuming I have readers) that I’m really a business teacher and not an Internet comedian after all. I have similar issues in my personal life, as I sink deeper and deeper into middle age and start catching myself acting responsibly and making mature decisions. At such times I will generally go out and do the most juvenile I can think of that won’t get me shot, arrested or fired (into which category, alas, running around pelting people with cream pies and yelling “Ya-HA! Ya-HA!” does not fall), and when I feel the blog is getting too dark I will try to find you a story about something completely stupid. There was a story about a botched refund this week that should do the trick…

According to the story from the local ABC News affiliate, a woman in Jacksonville, Florida was having trouble with a used car dealership that was failing to honor the warranty they had sold her. So she reported them to the State Department of Motor Vehicles, and after due investigation the dealer was ordered to refund her the money she had paid for the repairs. So they did – in loose change. Specifically, it was about $85 in pennies and the rest in $1 bills…

Now, I’m not going to dispute that pennies or dollars are legal tender, or that the dealership had a legal right to pay the refund in whatever fashion they felt was appropriate. My questions are why anyone would risk venting their spleen – and making themselves look even worse to potential customers – by pulling this sort of prank, and also where a car dealership got 8,500 pennies in the first place…

In the Internet age, most businesses that want to be successful are very careful about their public image, and in particular about their online reputation. We’ve already seen people threatening to sue online review sites like Yelp and Angie’s List for damaging their reputation, and there are persistent reports of various companies large and small paying people to leave positive reviews about them and artificially improve their online rating. By the same token, if you’ve done something as blatantly stupid as playing games with the small print on a contract and then getting called on it by the State government, I would think the last thing you would want to do is create a funny story that will get you mocked by thousands of scruffy bloggers around the world…

The second part of the question is why anybody would go to such lengths to pull such a prank in the first place. Car dealerships aren’t normally cash businesses, and unless this one also doubles as a bank there is no reason for them to have 8,500 pennies around in the first place. That may not sound like a lot, but that’s around 50 pounds of coins. If you wanted to roll them it would be enough for 170 rolls of pennies, but these were apparently just loose in a couple of bags. Unless the dealership also doubles as a strip club it shouldn’t have had 215 loose $1 bills lying around either, but I think we can probably conclude that the owner went to the bank after deciding to be rude to his customer…

Okay, so this story isn’t an atrocity. The customer in our story can almost certainly roll up the pennies and take them to her bank, and she can probably use the dollar bills to buy coffee or pay tolls or what have you. And it is possible that the owner of the dealership believes that there is no such thing as bad publicity, and is laughing all the way back to the bank. But I prefer to believe that it’s a prank gone wrong, a customer’s multi-media revenge, and a cautionary tale for anyone who might have been planning a similar stunt – or anything else that will bring you to the negative attention of the public…

Is it Really the Thought?

A while back I was talking with a few friends about how one might explain various customs to someone who was either so sheltered that they’d never experienced any, or so poorly socialized that they couldn’t understand things that you and I would take for granted. Fictional characters like this have been popular for years, since they present multiple opportunities to have another character explain various complexities of the plot to them (and thereby to the audience), as well as offering comic relief possibilities as they try to cope with familiar (to us) situations that they find baffling. But what occurred to me is that sometimes the social conventions we’ve gotten used to are so counter-intuitive that they actually cause problems even for people who are familiar with them. So I thought it might be fun to explain a few of these ideas to someone who has no grasp of them to begin with. To protect his anonymity (and since he’s a fictional character and I don’t have access to his copyright) I’ll just refer to him as Dr. S…

MPB: Good morning, Dr. S, and thank you for joining us.

Dr. S: I’m glad to be here.

MPB: I thought we might begin this discussion with a familiar platitude, “It’s the thought that counts,” which I understand you consider confusing and illogical.

Dr. S: Yes; that’s a good one. If it is actually the thought that counts in obtaining a present for someone, why do you need to proceed beyond the thought? Is it more important to produce tangible evidence of your thought, or is this maxim simply wrong to begin with?

MPB: Well, as is often the case, I believe that this statement and the associated custom are using the word “thought” as a convenient shorthand for a more complex convention. Consider, if you will, the steps required to purchase a gift for someone: First, you must identify something that the recipient might actually want or enjoy. Second, you must determine that your idea is feasible, practical, and affordable, all of which will vary not only with the gift concept but also with your budget and your ability to obtain specific classes of gift. Third, you must determine that your idea is appropriate to the recipient, the occasion, and the social conventions to which they (not you) conform. It serves no purpose to select a gift that implies your desire for a romantic relationship with the recipient if you have no such desire, or for that matter to identify an ideal gift which can’t be obtained or which you cannot afford.

Dr. S.: But there are thousands, if not millions, of gift-giving sites on the Internet. Is this process really that difficult?

MPB: That would depend entirely on how well you know the recipient, of course – and on how well you understand the social, political, financial and even religious context of the occasion and your relationship with the recipient. But even in very simple cases, it is clear that all of these considerations will require thought, as will the research (whether Internet, library, key informant, or expert opinion) needed to resolve the issue.

Dr. S. (raises one eyebrow): This is certainly the case. So “the thought” represents the effort to identify an acceptable gift, rather than merely selecting something at random?

MPB: You might be surprised how many people select a gift by simply picking up whatever is on the checkout counter at the supermarket. But that raises a fourth point: Once you have made your selection, you must identify where such an item can be obtained, and how to travel to that place. If your recipient would most like to receive a box of oranges, and you happen to have an orange tree in your garden, this will be relatively easy; if the item you have selected is available only from a brick-and-mortar retailer that does not have an outlet in your community, this will take quite a bit more effort. But in any case, you will have to devote at least some thought to obtaining the gift, wrapping it, transporting it, storing it, and possibly even hiding it, in the case where the recipient lives with you or is a frequent visitor.

Dr. S.: That does seem rather involved.

MPB: It is frequently more difficult than the actual purchase. However, all of this still misses the main point, which is that of why you are doing all of this in the first place.

Dr. S.: I’m not sure I follow.

MPB: Regardless of how close you might be to the recipient, it would still be far easier to ignore the occasion and not do anything. You could simply declare a philosophical aversion to the occasion, or to the commercialization of celebratory events in the first place, and refuse to participate. However, you have instead considered that the recipient’s happiness is important enough to you that you have chosen to incur this cost and inconvenience in the first place. You have, literally, “thought” enough of them, and about them, to attempt the process in the first place and try to find something they would enjoy receiving in the second place.

Dr. S.: So it is the importance of making the attempt, and of expending the required thought in order to solve the various problems and complete the exercise, that is actually important?

MPB: Exactly. The statement that it is “the thought that counts” is an acknowledgement of your making the attempt, and of the recipient’s importance to you. If your effort to find an ideal (or even acceptable) offering falls short, this is far less important than the fact that you made the attempt in the first place…

Still Not Sure

A while back I wrote in this space about a $100,000 safety razor, and how I was having trouble determining if the whole thing was a hoax or not. We’ve seen cell phones inlaid with gold and precious stones that cost even more, mattress sets that cost nearly as much, and cashmere bathroom tissue that would certainly add up after a few years, but $100,000 for something you can obtain for less than a dollar per use seems excessive. If you use a disposable razor once and then throw it out, you’d still have to live for more than 273 years before the iridium razor would pay for itself. Even if you use one of the more absurdly overpriced cartridges (I’m looking at you, Gillette Fusion) once and then throw it out, you’d still need to shave for another 70 years or so before you’d break even. But as outrageous as that might seem, I still think that the $200,000 bottle of scotch is harder to believe…

According to a note on the Only Excess website, the master blenders over at Chivas Brothers are putting together a blend of the best and most expensive Scotch whiskey “…as a liquid tribute to the oldest crown jewels in the British Isles.” Part of it, of course, is the bottle itself, which is described as being “…made from black porcelain, adorned with 413 flawless black and white diamonds, as well as 22 carats of other gemstones, set in gold and silver.” Rarity is probably also a factor, since the run of this stuff will be limited to just 21 bottles; if you’re the sort of person who would want to drink $200,000 booze in the first place (that’s somewhere around $10,000 a shot, depending on how big the bottle actually is), you’d probably like the fact that no one else is going to be able to enjoy such a thing. But what really caught my attention was the fact that the liquid inside is said to be a blend of the best whiskeys made in Scotland. Years of hanging around with scotch drinkers has already taught me that the best scotches are all single-malt types – and that most real connoisseurs will not use blended scotch for insecticide…

Obviously, if such a product actually exists, the point of having it won’t be the quality of the liquor; it will be the status conferred by having one of the rarest beverages ever marketed, in one of the most opulent packages ever developed. You can see some billionaire or celebrity buying a bottle and then displaying it in a locked cabinet in their study – or opening the thing at a party and inviting all of the guests to sample a glass. What makes this story so fantastical is that unlike the iridium razor – which is guaranteed to function perfectly for ten years or be replaced by the manufacturer – this stuff could be accidentally guzzled by a drunken houseguest on a weekend bender (who might then give the bottle to a passing driver with a demand to get him a refill)…

For the same monetary outlay, you could obtain 250 bottles of an ordinary super-premium scotch whiskey (Johnny Walker Blue runs about that), or at least 21 cases (possibly more if you order all of it at once; most distributors will offer a volume discount on an order that large) – enough to get the average person seriously drunk for something on the order of four or five years. If you were willing to accept merely exceptional scotch, you’d have enough to get falling-down drunk every day for anywhere from fifty to one hundred years, or until you died of liver failure (whichever came first)…

Until I actually hear from someone who actually paid $200,000 for a single bottle of alcohol, I’m going to remain skeptical. Would anyone really charge that kind of money for such a small amount of product? More to the point, would anyone pay that much? Is this story for real, or is someone trolling me? Only time will tell…

Homicidal Chicken

It was with great concern, perhaps ever consternation, that I viewed the news story with the headline: “Armed Rooster Kills California Man” on the MSNBC website today. I know very little about biology, and even less about agriculture, genetic engineering, or animal husbandry, but from what I had been lead to understand about chickens, their normal behaviors do not include using tools, wielding weapons, or attacking humans. I suppose it might be possible for a chicken to grasp a weapon in one of its claws, but if the weapon were a gun, how would the bird pull the trigger? If it raised its other claw to the trigger guard it would fall down. And if the weapon were a knife, the chicken would then have to chase down its victim while hopping on one foot, which doesn’t seem practical if the victim is a human (who could presumable run away). It would be different for a bird which can fly (it could simply take wing with the gun in one claw and fire it with the other), but a chicken would find it difficult to stay aloft long enough to get off a shot…

Of course, this assumes a standard-issue meat-animal type of chicken. If we are talking about an anthropomorphic chicken of the sort you’d expect to find in a Warner Brothers cartoon, that could be quite different. One can almost picture platoons of six-foot tall white roosters with arms instead of wings, all dressed in military uniforms and wielding rifles, as they seek vengeance for thousands of years of wrongs, real, imagined and animated. Their battle-cry could be “Why did the human cross the road?” or “Eat this, Colonel!” Of course, they’d probably spook at the sight of mashed potatoes or dumplings, and they’d get positively snippy at the mention of gravy…

Alternately, we might imagine that some mad scientist who also happens to be a practicing vegan had created a genetically-engineered Battle Chicken, designed specifically to take bloody revenge on those who question why a chicken would want to cross a road in the first place – or maintain those “Why did the chicken cross the road?” joke sites. Given a sufficiently large number of such chickens – and enough chicken feed – an unscrupulous individual would have a real chance of taking over the world. Unless the United States and the other major military powers of the world were able to pool their efforts and develop an anti-chicken machine gun (preferably something with a rotisserie and barbeque function) it might be the end of the world as we know it…

Fortunately, upon reading the actual story much became clear. The chicken in question hadn’t armed itself; it was a fighting rooster and had been fitted with small razor blades attached to its feet in preparation for a cockfight. And the human victim hadn’t been shot, or had his throat slit, or even been chased down by a feathered minion of vengeance and cut to pieces; he was a participant in a cockfighting ring who had been slashed by one of the birds at a fighting event, and then avoided seeking medical attention in the hopes of also avoiding arrest and prosecution for his participation in an illegal sport. Far from being a flying nemesis, the chicken was just doing what millions of years of evolution had already programmed it to do when the fight was interrupted by the arrival of sheriff’s deputies and the bird had to vent its frustration on one of its hapless handlers…

So, other than comic relief, why am I calling your attention to such a story in a business blog? Because as comically misleading as this headline was, you can find far more outrageous things posted online almost any day of the week – and if you don’t read carefully, fact-check from multiple sources, and maintain a healthy skepticism, you’re likely to find yourself investing in a massive anti-poultry mortar for you back yard and a 12-gigawatt self-targeting laser on the roof to drive back the invading horde of battle chickens (or something equally silly) sooner or later…

Don’t Let This Happen

It occurred to me this week that while I’ve been issuing advice and Public Service Announcements about the advent of Valentine’s Day for years (ever since I started this blog), I’ve never told all of you about the incident that started the whole thing; the funny story that changed my perspective on this otherwise harmless holiday forever. It begins fifteen years ago this week, when I was still working for the Sav-on Drug Store company in Studio City, California. Like most general merchandise retailers, my drug store had set up Valentine’s Day decorations and signs as soon as we took down the last of the Christmas Clearance items, and set the Seasonal aisle a few days after New Year’s. Over the five ensuing weeks the traffic gradually picked up in the Seasonal aisle. For the first week or two it was limited to the truly compulsive customers, who clearly needed something to do, since they’d already finished their income tax forms; these were gradually replaced by women who were taking the holiday seriously and men who weren’t. By the start of February the traffic was mostly male, and by the day before V-Day it was mostly very relieved men (who had clearly forgotten the holiday at least once before)…

I was working the day shift on February 14, 1995, and the traffic flowing into the Seasonal aisle was completely male by then; men who had woken up that morning to realize that they had a significant other who would be expecting an acknowledgement of the holiday – and that they were empty-handed. It was easy to imagine them blowing out of the house in a tearing hurry, telling their wives or girlfriends that they had to get to an early meeting, we’ll celebrate the holiday tonight, okay? The traffic died down a little after the morning commute was over, only to redouble at lunch time, as the men who had gotten all the way to the office before realizing what day it was (and why their significant others had been giving them funny looks this morning) dashed out to avoid coming home empty-handed – and probably sleeping on the couch until Arbor Day (which is in June, by the by)…

Not everyone is able to go shopping on their lunch hour, however; at the start of the evening commute the traffic picked up again, the men now frantically trying to avoid coming home with nothing but a dumb smile and the promise of a nice dinner (after a three-hour wait, no doubt). By the time I was about to go off-shift at 6:00 that evening, the Seasonal aisle was looking pretty picked over. But just at that moment, a man ran in from the parking lot in a total panic.

“Quick!” he yelled at me. “I need something heart-shaped!”

“Well,” I replied, “There are still a few items in the Season aisle that might –“

“No time!” he yelled, turning to grab something out of one of the “On Special” baskets in front of the registers. “What about these? Are they heart shaped?”

I looked at the yellow-and-blue boxes in his hands. “Those are suppositories, sir,” I told him.

“Yes, but are they heart-shaped?” the man yelped.

“Well… Kinda,” I replied.

“Great!” he bellowed, throwing some money on the counter. “I’ll take five boxes! Keep the change!” He grabbed his five boxes of suppositories and bolted back out into the parking lot…

The next day I scanned the news carefully, but I didn’t find any stories about a man being murdered in some fashion that involved five boxes of suppositories (received as a Valentine’s Day gift or otherwise), so I imagine that he lived through the experience. But I think it demonstrates better than any other cautionary tale could that sometimes it’s better to arrive empty-handed and make up a story about what you’re going to do to celebrate the holiday than it is to just grab something at random and take your chances on it being appropriate to the occasion. So let me close by saying to all of my readers (assuming that I have readers): don’t let this happen in YOUR family…