Reason Number 27 Why I Don't Do Starbucks

They have a gift card personalization program - get a gift card with a personal message on it.  According to them, however, foreign phrases and political statements are off limits.

However, the problem is "Laissez Faire" appears to be the only foreign phrase political statement they won't print.  Seems they will print "People Not Profits" and "Si Se Puede".

For the record, "laissez faire" is French for "leave us alone", describing the classic liberal philosophy of open markets and limited government intervention.  "Si Se Puede" is Spanish for "Yes We Can", the slogan of the United Farm Workers and recently adopted, in English, by Barak Obama.

In other words, a company who is a great example of a capitalism success story won't print pro-Capitalism slogans on cards, just pro-Socialist ones.

And this is why I buy my coffee from Tully's.

del.icio.us Tags: capitalism,socialism,economics,coffee

Starbucks and 'Laissez Faire'

The Darkness Falls

We've all heard about the overreaction of the city of Boston to a guerilla marketing campaign for a cartoon show.  Today, we learn that the head of Cartoon Network is resigning over it.  And today, I'm going to comment on it.

Boston should slip into the sea.  Cleanse the idiocy with cold salt water and lobsters.  I'm sorry to say I lived there for a time, went to school there for a time, and enjoyed it - I'll certainly never go back now.

What happened to our collective common sense, people?  Ever since 9/11, were' so afraid of our own shadows that anyone walking down the street with a boxcutter in his back pocket, or two turbaned and robed men talking to one another quietly in the subway, or a Lite Brite on a street corner, is now considered a terrorist threat that demands some sort of response.  I guess we're lucky that the response was just a bunch of paranoid morons calling the authorities, and not some whack-job rounding up a vigilante posse.  Funny, I don't feel lucky - I feel dirty.

Turner Broadcasting, owner of Cartoon Network, apologized and has paid US$2 million to Boston to compensate them for the emergency response they took.  I'm sorry, but if I overreact to a situation and incur personal costs, why should anyone else but me be responsible for my actions?  Oh, that's right, I forgot - this is the New America, where personal responsibility is neither taught nor practiced.  Those few of us with this rare commodity are sitting back, shaking our heads, and wondering where the hell our country got off to.

Our elected leaders have paid lip service for five years that we should not lose the American Way of Life (tm) because of terrorism.  All this time, however, the American Way of Life has been slowly slipping away, slowly boiling to death like a frog in a pot of cool water over a Bunsen burner, as we submit to random searches and pat down on subways, invasive searches of our bags and limits on our speech as we try to board airplanes, and compilation of our personal data into lists that tell us where and how we can't travel.  We've lost our common sense to fear-based irrationality wrapped in the blanket of "security concerns".  We've lost our rational thought and replaced with jingoism.  We've lost our sense of humour and replaced it with self-importance as a cog in the great machine.

In my opinion, the head of Cartoon Network should still be in his role, and the head of Turner Broadcasting shouldn't be writing checks.  They should both be looking at the knee-jerkers and bureaucrats in Boston and asking them, "Why is your stupidity our problem?  Why should we pay for your actions?  Stupidity should be painful - more correctly, your stupidity should be painful to you."  And the people of Boston should be looking hard and asking hard questions at these mental midgets come next election day.

New Toyota Commercials - WTF?

I wasn't sure where else to put this idea, but I've been really pissed at the new Toyota commercials.  Despite the fact that I'll most likely never buy a Toyota for my own use (my daughter has one I bought her when she graduated high school), these commercials ensure that I'll never buy one for anyone.

The commercials start innocuous enough - a few pics of scenery and people enjoying themselves, with a song-over with the lyrics, "This is the place I want to live... And the

way I want to drive..."  I can only presume they're tailored for different parts of the country - I live in Seattle, so it's tailored for the Pacific Northwest.

Anyway, after the song lyric, a voice-over comes on, in a gentle masculine voice, "There's something special about this part of the country," followed by different phrases, such as, "we care about the environment," and, "we care about family values."

WTF?

My first response to these was simple: Unlike those yahoo's in Montana.

Really, think about it - as if people in other parts of the country don't care about the environment, or have family values, or can respond to jingoistic marketing catch-phrases.  Give me a break.

Technorati tags: driving, marketing

Zune Marketing via Orwell

OK, this isn't politics per se, but I have to get it off my chest.  The Microsoft Zune marketing campaign is disturbing me greatly.

There are two ads I've seen for the Zune that make me think the marketing folks at Microsoft have taken George Orwell's 1984 and turned into a reference manual.

The first ad has text which reads, "Welcome to the Social".  The second ad reads, "Anti-antisocial".  Both are anti-anti-bullshit.

I remember when I was a teenager - Sony had introduced the Walkman a few years earlier, and I had a competitor's version.  I used to walk around wearing headphones and listening to mix-tapes I made or maybe a purchased album.  At no time did I think I was being social - as a matter of fact, I knew, and was told often, that wearing headphones was antisocial.  Well, duh, of course it's antisocial - when I'm on the bus, or a plane, or waiting around in public, it's easier to put on my music, open my book, and tune out everyone else.  Being social means interacting with other folks around you - I was doing the opposite.

The Walkman for the new millennium is the iPod, and one of its competitors is the Zune.  The technology has changed, but the result is the same - you plug in earphones and listen to your music and tune out the people around you.  It's no more social than the Walkman, or the Discman, or any other technology that diverts one or more of your senses away from the folks around you.  It's never been "social".  It's never been "anti-antisocial".  And that's the disturbing part...

Microsoft appears to be trying to twist the meaning of putting on a set of headphones and listening to your own personal soundtrack as "social" instead of antisocial.  Much like Orwell's doublespeak, Microsoft marketing is trying to pull a fast one on us.

Don't believe the hype - buy the player you want for the features it has, not for the hype.  Listening to music on an MP3 player, or a Walkman, or Discman, or whatever, is not, has never been, and will never be "social".  It will always be antisocial.  And it matters not one whit what a marketer redefines words to mean.

Technorati tags: marketing