October 29th, 2006 Rachel
I clipped this post about a Douwe Egberts promotional item (created by Pink Eye) yesterday, and I’m glad I waited a bit to post on it. The initial reason for the delay is because I was searching around to find one up for sale. Nope; looks like this was a marketing stunt only with no further plans to bring it to market.
Bummer.
But the reason I’m happy to have waited is because the comments that have come up since the initial post, though few, raise interesting points.
Here’s what Lewis had to say:
Tumblers have been around for ever that are easier to carry and, I
suspect, keep coffee hotter longer than these cups. You are correct:
this is a marketing stunt not a product benefit. In effect, students
are being manipulated and exploited for their eagerness to be seen as
hip or cool.
Students are buying an inferior product in exhange for satisfying a
desire. Nothing wrong from the students’ point of view ;as I believe
they know what they are buying and why they are buying the cup, but not
a product nor a marketing strategy with legs. Instead, we have a fast
grab for the dollar.
Now, I checked out Lewis’s blog and he’s got a lot of interesting things to say about marketing and business. But aside from what’s pointed out below his comment on the cup post (it wasn’t for sale, it’s promotional), I think it’d be a bit extreme to say students are being “exploited” because they want to be cool. Most students I know are too busy/frantic to do anything other than the following:
1. Go to campus
2. Go to nearest Tim Hortons/Dunkin Donuts/Starbucks/Second Cup (or whatever…)
3. Mutter coffee order
4. Walk away with paper cup filled with steaming hot “focus” for the 3 hour lecture ahead.
$10 thermos mugs were used once or twice, then forgotten at home or under a chair in a classroom. Preparing the coffee at home means time that’s not spent studying or sleeping…Personally, I’d be much more apt to call a student lazy/self-centered than to assume they’d be so easily manipulated by a marketing tactic like a freakin’ coffee mug.
But then there’s me - the girl who spent twenty minutes trying to find this mug online, credit card in hand. Recently de-student-ified (for now) and a big fan of jumbo coffee/tea mugs. They don’t sell the amazing Pier 1 Imports mugs anymore, which bear a striking resemblance to the one above. If I were still a student, I would have loved to have a real mug instead of a thermal mug thing (I personal can’t stand them…something about the handle, just doesn’t work for me) or a paper cup in my hands for that 9am film class. It may not be very handy in the car, but in weighing the functionality (I agree with Lewis that the thermal capabilities are probably lower) against the familiarity of that shape in the morning…I’ll take familiar and comfortable any day.
P.S. - I wonder if anyone cared this much about the actual benefits of, or strategy behind, stress balls.
Posted in Marketing | No Comments »
October 28th, 2006 Rachel
In the six months (!!) since I moved back to the U.S. from seven years north of the border in (what i consider to be) my hometown of Toronto, Ontario…this scenario has happened several times:
“Soooo…how do you like being back in America?”
“Um, it’s good - great. Yeah, I like it.”
“Does it feel weird?”
“Nope, not really…I mean, ya know…I did live here for a long time before living in Toronto…”
“Right, right, but…aren’t there, like - well…okay, what’s the BIGGEST difference between living in Canada and living in the U.S.A.?”
Sigh. Up until now I’ve not really had a good answer. I mean, besides the processed vs. american cheese, no french on my Cap’n Crunch box, a lack of frigidly cold winters (but that’s more a Toronto vs. L.A. thing…), eh vs. huh, washroom vs. restroom (”You’re going to the laundry room? What?”), rainbow money vs. the green stuff, and oreos being back in bags instead of boxes…I’m comin’ up empty.
Until now. Now, whenever someone asks me that question, my answer is gonna be about why this is just fine and dandy in the U.S., but completely incorrect everywhere else in the world.
Jane went to the store to get some fish and marshmallows for the lady who liked to think she was her “mother.”
If you don’t see what I’m talking about, don’t worry (or do - you might want to stop reading right here because I’m a bit of a grammar freak which means this is likely gonna mean a lot more to me…kinda sad, but true). It’ll become clear as we go along.
While editing a document (which shall remain nameless…shhhh), I came across this setup time and time again. Not fish and marshmallows, not pretend mothers, and no person name Jane. What I kept seeing was this equation — quotation mark, text, period, end quotation mark. As the sirens would be going off in my head (”end quotation mark THEN period…end quotation mark THEN period!!”), my smarty pants husband pointed out that he’s been seeing that all over the place. In formal documents. By professional writers.
I panicked a little at first — what he was saying could mean that for four years of university I had painstakingly made sure that the underlined scenario above never happened. Had I been wrong all this time? And had not ONE professor/T.A. ever pointed it out????
So I did some research. Meaning I Googled it. And apparently I’m not alone in wondering what’s up with this.
Here’s some of my findings:
From Quizzes on Punctuation Marks (sounds like fun!!) -
“There are peculiar typographical reasons why the period and
comma go inside the quotation mark in the United States. In the days when printing used raised bits
of metal, “.” and “,” were the most delicate, and were in danger of
damage (the face of the piece of type might break off from the body, or
be bent or dented from above)
if they had a ‘”‘ on one side and a blank space on the other. Hence the
convention arose of always using ‘.”‘ and ‘,”‘ rather than ‘”.’ and
‘”,’, regardless of logic.” This seems to be an argument to return to
something more logical, but there is little impetus to do so within the
United States.”
Wikipedia confirmed this quandary too.
In British English, when a quotation mark appears at the end of a
sentence the full stop is usually placed after it. The matter is partly
determined by the length of the enclosed material: the longer it is,
more acceptable it is that the full stop should come first. Any full
sentence enclosed within quotation marks will have its full stop before
the final quotation mark.
In American English the full stop normally comes before the
quotation mark. (This applies to commas and some other punctuation,
also.)
Examples of typical usage:
- [British:] You say “tomAYto”, I say “tomAHto”.
- [American:] You say “tomAYto,” I say “tomAHto.”
As I’m reading all this the other day, I started vaguely remembering a teacher mentioning this back when I first moved up North. I’m relieved that I hadn’t been neurotic about grammar INCORRECTLY for the four years where (at the time, at least…) it mattered most. While still baffled at this discrepancy, I’m happy to have an answer to what seemed like a countrywide “grammar laxification” epidemic (though the answer still employs so little logic). And I also have an answer to that ever popular question.
“So, really…what’s the thing you find to be MOST different now that you’re living in the U.S.A. and not Canada?”
“Damn full stops showing up before the end quotes. THAT I will NEVER get used to.”
Posted in Issues, L.A., Personal, Toronto | 1 Comment »
October 23rd, 2006 Rachel
I think the people who wear band shirts purchased at concerts at the concert are the same people who take vacations to Myrtle Beach in their seventies and within fifteen minutes of arriving have a “Beach Bum, Myrtle Beach, SC” t-shirt stacked over the t-shirt they were wearing when they arrived, along with a matching Tilly hat.
It’s endearing in your seventies.
It’s just plain wrong at a concert. Especially when it’s not 1998, you’re not a thirteen year old girl with braces and teeny butterfly clips in your hair, and N Sync doesn’t rock your world (not endearing either, but nothing looks right thinking back on the scene that was Teenybopperdom, the Boy Band/Girl Power years).
We know you love the band. That’s why you’re here, right? But the “punk” shirt you bought from Hot Topic looks ridiculous under there and it’s kind of scaring me that the amount of gel in your hair held that faux-hawk still when you squeezed your head through the neck hole.
Shudder…
But then again, maybe I’m just cynical and the guy with the opening bands sweatshirt, wristbands, tote bag and shopping bag holding what appears to be the red boy short undies with the band’s logo on the bum (for a girlfriend? maybe?)…is just a bigger fan than me.
I’ll wear my shirt with pride. Next week.
Posted in Music, Personal | 2 Comments »
October 22nd, 2006 Rachel
I ran past my gym tonight.
It’s funny — you live someplace for a while, you start running and you get comfortable. It becomes a habit, a no-brainer, just part of life. Your town/city feels smaller and more familiar once you’ve ran around it. Then you move. Maybe even only five minutes away.
That’s what happened the first time; I literally moved a five minute drive/15-20 minute walk from my old house. It felt weird, the streets were different (even if they were adjacent to streets I’d ran on for the two previous years), and my schedule had shifted. These were some of the larger reasons why I went running a total of five times in the year and a half I lived there. There were also about twenty thousand other excuses that came up along the way…but they varied from day to day.
Then I moved down here and for as many people as I see pounding away on treadmills, I’m shocked at the small proportion of runners I’ve seen toodling around town. So, for the last seven months I’ve done what most Old Townies seem to do — I walk Colorado, sit in cute little restaurants, and visit the many many stores. A long walk would be going to a movie, a short walk just downstairs to let the puppy out.
I joined a yoga studio — got bored, stopped going. I’ve got a gym membership that I never seem to have time for. And a micro gym facility two floors downstairs from where I type.
Wait, didn’t this used to be simpler?
Running is easy. Okay, not easy easy…but easy to get prepared for (shoes? check. pants? got ‘em. hair elastic? you betcha.) and flexible in terms of when and where (Yoga Studio = “Oh darn…class is going to start in five minutes, I’ll never make it…soooooo, another episode of Arrested Development? Alrighty then.” Gym = “It’s too early/late”).
The first run is always the most awkward. Where do you go and for how long? How do you gauge time out vs. time back (especially when you’re as anti-watch as me…)? Are there gonna be hills? Fortunately (for now at least) there was narry a hill in sight. And the where/time actually worked out pretty well, especially considering I walked the last couple blocks.
I still want to use that gym membership more. Maybe lunches a few days of the week? Weekends are just so painfully crowded. But it’s also nice to know that in a pinch, or when the mood strikes, I have some place to run. It’ll take a few weeks of forcing it, I’m sure…but lets hope this time it becomes a habit again. Fingers crossed…
Posted in L.A., Personal, Toronto | No Comments »
October 11th, 2006 Rachel
So.
You get a blog topic formulated in your mind. It’s not an atypical one (shoddy customer service), but in a relatively brief period of time multiple interactions have arisen which bring the “wtf, why don’t they care — who are these people?!?!” grumbling to the front of your mind.
Then someone out there has to go and do something like “care” and it all goes out the window.
Abbreviated version of former topic goes something like this: Aldo shoe saleswoman texts someone on her cell phone instead of noticing I’m standing in front of her holding one shoe, then basically calls me an idiot/loser for shopping in Aurora when I live in Los Angeles (like, omigod…). Then the next day “The New Air Canada - less people, more profits” (disgruntled but humourous guy at the counter’s words, not mine) introduced us to ridiculously long lines, the dysfunctional process of mandatory ‘kiosk then counter’, and a surly woman manning the line. She scoffed when we said “Hey, it’s 7am and our flight’s at 7:55…should we be worried 30 people are still ahead of us?” and told us we were crazy - first flight’s at 10am. She then wouldn’t make eye contact while I glared sleepily/grumpily at her from the counter while confirming our seats on said 10am flight once we’d missed the 7:55 cut off time…at 7:25.
We’ve all been there, we’ve all wanted to inflict pain (or at least annoyance and an earache) on one person in the service/retail industry at one time or another. [I’ve been there, I understand both sides, customers do really really suck sometimes too].
Which brings me to the caring part.
Adam and I are having the big ol’ happy formal wedding next year, August to be [more] exact. Since it’s a while til then and lots of out of towners are expected, I wanted to have ’save the date!’ cards printed up — in the process of checking them out, I wen to Papyrus and found ’save the date!’ cards…WITH MAGNETS. And the ability to put a photo of us on there. Photos + Magnets = Uber Giddy Me.
First, the order was done in two weeks instead of four. Wow, great! Then I picked them up, scurried to my car and peaked in all the boxes and bags. In the process of adoringly inspecting the cute/cute/cute magnets, I noticed the envelopes were blank. Hmmm…I placed this order a while ago, so I can’t quite remember if I splurged on the return address already being on there…
I called them up, after running different scenarios in my head (I don’t really need the return address on there…it’s not that difficult…but the hand cramps…). The woman on the phone was super nice, checked my order and calm but totally apologetic about the mistake — They’d get new ones printed up ASAP, and no need to return the envelopes. Wow…how easy was that? And enough time to spare to actually finalize a guest list…woohoo!
Having gone with the “always get 25 or so more than you think you’ll need, just in case…” I was prepared to have 24 extra magnets of our smiling mugs laying around when all is said and done. Well, apparently the printer dozed off and forgot to count because there’s 75 more magnets than I was expecting. Not perfect, but 100x better than the opposite scenario. And hey…Halloween is coming up…
Quick to rectify mistakes, overcompensating instead of undercompensating, and just a generally pleasant experience. Nicely done, Papyrus…nicely done. I’ll be back for napkins, formal invitations, and more.
Posted in Personal, Toronto, Traveling | No Comments »
