Every store I ever visited sent me an email today. Or so it feels.
I don’t even have to make a list of places I may want to unsubscribe from.
The thing is that the average “European” doesn’t have a bull’s notion about Thanksgiving or Black Friday. If anything, Black Friday sounds akin to Bloody Sunday.
We never had Black Friday in Europe up until about 2 years ago. It’s just marketing and no apologies.
I loved how the sun lit up the windows of the ostentatiously classy restaurant come wine bar on St. Andrew’s Street in Dublin called Stanley’s. The bleached turquoise exterior with golden letters spelled understated chic.
A few doors down from the expensive Trocadero, the location seemed perfect for such a place.
It opened about 2 years ago. Today I found that it’s been replaced with a place called Kathmandu, a gerrish, bright orange Nepalese eatery. Full of people.
Stanley’s was never full of people.
Why? Where did they go wrong? Where didn’t they go right, more like? The broadly positive Irish Times review and then another even more positive one? The perfect location? The classy interior in modern blues and grays? What more could people want?
Or is it maybe that classy is old-fashioned. Maybe these things don’t sell anymore.
I love old books, films, chandeliers, even houses. Often these things sell at a perplexing yet welcome discount. Has it always been this way – that old things are cheap?
Writing up my list of the Christmas gifts I want to give, I realised that I strongly prefer older things. I think it’s from reading too many XIX century novels…
Which would you rather get for Christmas, a new iPhone or an antique chandelier?
It turns out that the iPhone is about five times the price. This raises another point: did old things always go at a discount?
And finally, maybe that’s why Stanley’s closed down. Perhaps their bet was on people’s vanity, a desire for a classy place to shorten the protracted winters nights. But it never caught on.
Trying to be old without actually being old may be a hard sell.
Having to get up at 5:25 am to go to a distant hospital is remarkably effective at crystallising negative conclusions. On the bright side, knowing what not to do is super important. Via negativa and all that.
The train ride emphasised the UI problems in Amazon.
Look at this screen: why in the name of G-d is the main part of the screen a sharing button?
Why am I paying 40 quid per book and being constantly “encouraged” to make Amazon even more money?
I don’t mind a little bit of it, but this is the unmissable, ever-present centre-piece of the their user interface.
What a fail.
Coming home after a day of travelling and exploring a new hospital, I was greeted by a letter from Tesco. “Every little helps”, I think, as I open it…
So I asked for a new Clubcard cause the old one stopped working – and they sent it to me with this explanatory note on how to use a loyalty card (cause, you know, customers need one).
So if a=b, b=a… Am I right? Well, if €1=1 point, 1 point should equal €1.
But no, it actually equals one cent (you get a percent back as a coupon).
Marketing strategies that offend people’s intelligence are a bad idea.
(Also, it turns out that Irish Tesco is a considerably more upmarket establishment than its eponymous parent in the UK. The Irish branch exists as a separate subsidiary so as to not have to reveal the markups on their Irish lines, which I can only image are astronomical.)
Then Twitter came to just leave me no chance at a peaceful day of consuming products and services….
This reminds me of that time that my friends, having watched The Wolf of Wall Street, bought tickets to Jordan Belfort’s two-hour seminar in Dublin – where he promised to reveal all his woof-woof-woooolfy secrets.
If there was one thing that I learnt from watching The Wolf of Wall Street, it’s that one shouldn’t buy from people like him:
What did my friends say about the seminar? That they just paid 50 euro to attend a seminar that was basically a sales pitch asking them to attend a considerably more expensive two-day seminar in London. That’s where you really learn the secrets, you see.
The idea these people have is that “it’s a numbers game, so I will just follow everyone and see what I catch”. It makes people feel expendable.
Way too much offensive marketing for one day. I can’t be the only one pissed off by these marketing strategies, can I?
All publicity is good publicity and, naturally, if I had actually been very annoyed, I wouldn’t have written about the above. Twitter, Amazon and Tesco are still super-talented marketers. They have already won, and these are minor bloopers.
And then there is the utterly ridiculous, from Colgate:
It’s an alright toothbrush though 😉
A millennial's musings 