By admin
How do you feel when you leave a store, walk back to your car, and find a flyer on your windshield? Happy and eager to read the flyer? Or annoyed at being inconvenienced with it? My guess is the latter. You have just been burdened with a piece of trash that you are now responsible for disposing of. In fact in today’s society you are responsible for making sure it gets recycled properly.
Perhaps you have even been so annoyed that you let it make a litterbug out of you, pulling it off your windshield and letting it flutter to the pavement on the parking lot. Doesn’t that make you want to sort of hurry up and speed away at that point? You are now a fugitive attempting to make a getaway! Didn’t plan on that when running to the store for milk did you?
Somehow, you have now committed a crime - one which you probably think you are justified in, as the real blame goes to the company distributing those stupid flyers. Doesn’t it? Truth be told, the judge will probably not see it that way. What the company did was legal. What you did was not. They did not commit an intentional act of littering. You did. They are allowed to advertise in this manner and you are responsible for properly dealing with the literature you received.
Have you ever not even noticed it until after you started driving away? This happens sometimes with the smaller ones. That can really be annoying, especially if it creates a blind spot. As a matter of fact I have (on occasion) not noticed large ones until after I was on the road and suddenly had to deal with a rather hazardous blind spot on my front windshield. Note that this is also illegal - for me, not the company who just made a criminal out of me while I wasn’t looking.
The most tempting way to deal with this situation is - you guessed it - by turning on your windshield wipers. Been there, done that! It doesn’t always work. In fact sometimes this only repositions the flyer in a place that creates an even larger blindspot and you may be forced to pull over and deal with it. How embarrassing! If by some miracle you are able to free it with the windshield wiper, you are now littering on the highway - a much more serious offense than littering in the parking lot and it could end up costing you $500. Or worse, it could fly off and land on the windshield of some total idiot behind you and cause a traffic accident.
If that happens, how do you feel about going to the furniture store sale?
What are these companies thinking with this kind of marketing? How can it possibly work? Are we are such dolts that we will remember a sale at the cleaners and not remember that it nearly got us arrested or killed finding out about it?
And what about these kids they hire to distribute the flyers. They aren’t exactly the kind of people I would choose for handling delicate equipment on my car. I wonder how many windshield wiper arms have been broken in this process. I wonder how many kids who broke windshield wipers were stupid enough to still leave the flyer afterwards. I wonder how many people who had this happen to them were too stupid to even put two and two together and figure out how their car was damaged.
Papa Riah
Technorati Tags: advertising, humor, marketing
By admin
If you have a credit card that you haven’t used in a couple years, expect to receive a letter from the bank abruptly announcing the cancellation of your account. Especially if it is a no annual fee account. Even if you have had the account for twenty years! This is a by-product of the current credit crunch, where banks are finding it necessary to cut costs in every nook and cranny.
If you have a credit card that you don’t use and do not pay an annual fee on, maintaining that account is a cost to the bank which brings back no revenue. They are taking a closer look at things these days. Once they get a feel that you are not one of the suckers who enslaves themselves for life to living on credit, they are going to cut you out of their balance sheet.
I received three of these notices over the last six weeks or so. Two from Chase and one from Discover. One of the Chase accounts had a $24,000 credit line and had been open since 1987. I don’t think I used it this decade however.
Papa Riah used to carry some pretty serious credit card balances back in the mid-90’s. To manage the accounts, I used to do something called balance surfing - which basically meant that I kept transferring the balances around to the bank offering the best terms for balance transfers. This sort of thing dried up a few years ago but was big in the 90’s. Because I never made a late payment, every bank in the country wanted my credit card balances and used to offer me crazy things like 0% interest for 6 months for whatever I transferred to them.
I was only too happy to oblige them. That was the way I kept my credit spotless. At one time I had over $50,000 in credit card debt. Of course when the teaser period was up the bank tried to hit me with something like 16% interest payments. But I simply transferred the balance to the best deals from my other banks at that point, oftentimes to the same bank I transferred the balance away from a few months earlier. There were always plenty of offers in the mail from all the cards I had a zero balance with.
They didn’t care. This is what the banks did back then. I suppose it all worked out for them and guys like me who worked the system were just a necessary cost of doing business. I had over $100,000 in available credit that I accumulated in the late 80’s when banks were at war trying to build credit accounts. (Back in my youth I used to use that credit for business purposes like financing the buying and selling of used cars from my front yard.)
The thing that I find hilarious about the banks sending me credit card account closure notices is that they wouldn’t let me close the accounts when I tried to a few years ago. One day I saw how ridiculous it was to have all these credit cards that I do not use and called many of them in an effort to close them. They were very adamant that I did not close them! They insisted that my credit score would go down and that I should keep the accounts. Not being in a mood to fight them on it I conceded and kept the accounts. Now I get notices that they are closing them on me!
Oh, and in case you are wondering how I ever paid off $50,000 in credit card debt, I got into the sub-prime mortgage business in the late 90’s. Piece of cake.
Papa Riah
Technorati Tags: banks, business, credit
By admin
The media is very fond of telling us about the bad economy every time we turn around. How does that make you feel? Like going out and buying new furniture and then going out to dinner? Or like withdrawing all your money from the bank and hiding it in a cracker box? For most people it’s the latter. And you know why, right? You got it - because most people are mindless drones who don’t think for themselves and allow everything they hear and see to program their behavior. In short, most people are idiots. (I know you aren’t one of them or you wouldn’t be here reading my blog.)
It just so happens that Mama Riah and I went out a couple weeks ago and bought a new couch before going out to dinner. The furniture store was packed. They were selling stuff left and right. The nightly news would have me think that these places are nailing boards over the entrance as all the employees get into a 27-mile long unemployment line. But that’s not what is happening if you get off your butt and go look around for yourself.
However that doesn’t mean that a bad economy isn’t right around the corner. A real bad economy. One where credit dries up completely and people actually do stop spending. What you have seen so far ain’t nothing folks. Things could get bad. Real bad. And you know how that could happen, right? The media keeps pounding and pounding the idea of how bad things are until it resonates inside everyone’s brains and then people become scared. In other words, we all get brainwashed into a bad economy.
For some people this has already happened. In our local news last week there was a story about an elderly lady who heard the news about possible bank failures so she promptly withdrew all her money in cash. She stashed an envelope containing $10,000 in a cracker box. For some inexplicable reason she then decided that she didn’t want the crackers and would rather have the $2.63 cents back that she spent for them, no doubt because of the scary bad economy news stories.
You can guess the rest. She glued to top back together and returned the cracker box to the market and got back her $2.63. After a couple days she realized her mistake and went to the store to ask for her crackers back, explaining the situation. They told her that returned food boxes go back to the manufacturer and that she likely had lost her money.
By some miracle the cracker box got put back on the shelf and purchased by an extremely honest family who returned the box to the store and reported the found money. So the crazy old cracker lady got her money back (and didn’t bother offering a reward), but that isn’t the point of this story.
It is this: If you hear that the economy is bad and that information alters your behavior, you will be responsible for helping to create a worse economy than the present situation (whatever that may be). In my opinion the present situation isn’t bad at all, based upon what I observe around me. Take it from an out-of-work sub-prime mortgage lender! However if we allow ourselves to be brainwashed into a bleak picture of things, it will become our reality. Just ask the crazy cracker lady.
Papa Riah
Technorati Tags: business, economy
How do you feel when you leave a store, walk back to your car, and find a flyer on your windshield? Happy and eager to read the flyer? Or annoyed at being inconvenienced with it? My guess is the latter. You have just been burdened with a piece of trash that you are now responsible for disposing of. In fact in today’s society you are responsible for making sure it gets recycled properly.