Archive for the ‘target’ Tag
Another week coming to an end and we’re already halfway through the month of September. The summer of 2016 went by in the wink of an eye and the holidays are again rushing towards us. I wonder to myself which retailer will strike the Christmas colors first. I suspect that as in years past Walmart will be the one to get things rolling 15 minutes after the Halloween holiday is over. That in itself is supremely depressing but it seems to get earlier and earlier every year regardless of how much we complain.
Yesterday I received this list of companies that have already made it known that Black Friday will begin for them by being open for business on Thanksgiving Day. I guess that’s the new approach to companies who put their employees families second on their list of priorities. That seems to be the ongoing retail way of thinking these days and unfortunately I can bitch about it all I want but no one in the retail establishment gives a damn what I think or what you think. Look at the upside . . . you’ll have a great place to spend your holiday if you get sick of eating Thanksgiving dinner, spending time with your family, or God forbid actually relaxing and enjoying the day. The almighty buck rules all. Make sure to thank these folks:
J.C. Penny
Kohl’s
Toy’s r Us
Target
Walmart
Sears
Macy’s
Belk
Sports Authority
h.h. greg
Dollar General
Best Buy
While I write this posting I have a Christmas wish that will never be fulfilled. I wish that the population of the millions of so-called consumers in this country would pull their collective heads out of the sand and stop allowing retailers to continue to think that the “great unwashed” are that easily controlled. It’s a lazy population that lets celebrities, the media, politicians, and big business tell them how to think, act, what to buy, and how to be politically correct at all times.
MERRY CHRISTMAS TO US ALL
You usually get what you deserve.
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Now that Thanksgiving has come and gone and I’ve digested all that good food I’d like nothing better than to relax for a bit. Dream on fool, here comes Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and New Years!
Meanwhile, here’s a quick look at our Thanksgiving table for this year. A luscious prime rib roast, asparagus, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and a chilled bottle of honey mead. I have to say it was the best Thanksgiving meal we’ve had in recent memory. Hope yours was the same or even better.
Black Friday has also come and gone and fortunately for me I missed it completely. I missed all the large crowds of pissed off shoppers, the pushing, the shoving, the fighting, and the shootings that makes these holiday seasons so near and dear to my heart. There’s nothing like a little physical combat with pregnant women, kids, or anyone else for that matter who gets in the way.
It feels extra special to shove some old lady to the ground and to grab an item from her hands that you wanted more than she did. A big thanks once again to Walmart for costing a few people their lives and many others minor injuries and arrests. The almighty dollar rules absolutely in the world of Walmart with very little concern for the consequences of their actions. Nothing new, right?
‘Deck the Halls’
‘Happy Holidays’
‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’
I’m not blaming all of these problems on Walmart because Target, Best Buy, and hundreds of others are just as guilty. My better-half and her daughter braved the crowds yesterday while I sat at home hoping they survived without injuries or incidents. They fortunately arrived home in one piece with more shopping war stories that I’ll be forced to listen to for another year. There are some traditions that need to go and Black Friday is one of them.
‘Absolute Lunacy’
This is the time of the year I thank God I’m claustrophobic. All the more reason to increase my on-line presence next year and never leave the freaking house.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS AND STAY OUT OF MY EFFING WAY
’A quote stolen from more than ten million shoppers.’
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I awoke this morning to find a beautiful sunny day with temperatures in the high fifties. After a few days of BLAH I was overjoyed. Once again my better-half was on a day-off and we grabbed our cameras and headed out to run errands and enjoy our day together.
I needed to do a little shopping for two flash drives that would help me solve my most recent computer crisis. I quickly found the drives at Target, made the purchase, and then retired to Starbucks for a coffee and to await her return. Oh, let me correct myself, not just a coffee but a Grande coffee. That’s a medium coffee from those of you normal people who haven’t let Starbucks change your approach to the English language. I try never to frequent Starbucks for only one reason, the cost. Today I had a medium coffee with milk, no latte, no whip cream, and no fancy flavoring. Just a medium cup of coffee and one snowman shaped sugar cookie. That’s six dollars I’ll never get back again and while the barista (PC BS Title) tried to soften the blow by telling me how good the cookie was, I wasn’t convinced. When she saw that her efforts weren’t working she then gave me a small card for a free game App for my IPad. Even the App sucked.
My better-half also has her own issues with Starbucks so after she arrived we quickly left that shopping center and made a stop at a nearby Dunkin Donuts for some good coffee and a breakfast sandwich. I had a medium size flavored coffee and a breakfast wrap with sausage, egg, and cheese that came to only five dollars. Eat that Starbucks!!
On the return home we passed a local horse farm where I stop occasionally to take pictures and to pet a horse or two. I found out something interesting during my visit today that I never knew before. Horses and cats seem to have a lot in common. I walked up to the fence of the corral and one of the horses spotted me and made a beeline straight for me. He walked right up to me, nuzzled my hand, and got a few pats on his nose. I had my camera out and started snapping away when he suddenly turned around and gave me his large ass to look at. He refused to turn back around and face the camera for some reason. He must have been a little annoyed that after coming right over to me I hadn’t rewarded him with a carrot, an apple, or a few sugar cubes. He was being a little pissy to say the least.
That’s the same routine my cat sometimes uses when he doesn’t get his way. He sits in the middle of the room directly in front of me with his back turned and gives me the "Big Ignore". Who knew it was a trait for horses too. I returned to the car properly chastened and we headed home.
Another day here in the paradise that is Maine.
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I’m a child of television. I come by it honestly because I was a member of the first generation that had TV. So for good or bad I’ve spent a great deal of my life listening and watching the tube. In my early years television was unsophisticated and simple with only three networks to choose from and a 12” black and white screen.
Years later it was still black and white pictures but there were rumors of something called ‘Pay TV’ on the horizon. It was the latest and greatest evolution of Television where you paid a monthly fee and there would be no commercial interruptions. Around that same time full color TV’s were introduced. The worst thing about ‘Pay TV’ was that we bought the fiction hook, line, and sinker. Before we knew it cable TV was born and so began the steadily rising monthly fees, surcharges, and the reintroduction of commercials but only on a limited basis (so they said). Yeah, we bought that BS as well.
Move forward a few more years and the monthly rates continued to increase based solely on the companies ability to increase the number of channels that you really weren’t all that interested in having but they were “part of the package”. More commercials were then added because the companies claimed a need for extra revenues to help cover their costs of production and maintenance of their infrastructure. Another giant pile of BS.
Move forward in time to yesterday. I’m now receiving my TV programming by the satellite dish hanging off the side of my house. Pretty impressive but only if you live somewhere where it never rains or snows. I never see any reduction in my monthly fees due to all of the weather related interruptions in service. I especially enjoy winter and those numerous trips I’m forced to make in my bathrobe to clear the dish during snow squalls. I also don’t appreciate all of the extra channels I’ve been involuntarily stuck paying for because “it’s part of the package”. You’d think by now they’d have a better list of stupid reasons for inflating our monthly charges.
I never thought I’d see the day when advertisements would come to be thirty minutes long on virtually every channel for a good part of the morning viewing hours. How stupid is it that the advertisers then take short breaks during those half-hour infomercials for a commercial or two. Commercials inside commercials, unbelievable right?
We are inundated with commercials everywhere everyday. Planes flying over our beaches. Talking digital images on every end cap at Walmart activated as you walk by to spew their annoying messages. Gas station pumps talking in your ear with more lame and unimportant messages. It just never stops, so I decided to do a little research.
For two hours last evening during good old TV prime time (6-8 pm), I began counting the number of commercials. In a 120 minute time frame on two different channels I was forced to listen to all of these in this exact order:
Transvaginal Mesh Lawsuits, Back Support Device, Xarelto Drug, Hair Club, Sleep Number Beds, Belviq Weight Loss Drug, DR rapid fire log splitters, Hip replacement implant lawsuits, Dolphin Tale 2 Trailer, Little Caesars Pizza, Target, Gone Girl Movie Trailer, News Update, Lowry Law Firm, Toyota, Dick’s Discount Furniture, Dunkin Donuts, The Box Trolls Trailer, Hannaford Foods, Political Ad Maine, Kohl’s, Dodge, Scion Maze Runner Trailer, Sonic, Hershey, Dos Equis, Hanes Underwear, Nasacort Allergy Meds, US Navy, Dairy Queen, Geico, Reese’s Pieces, Dewars Whiskey, Gillette Razor, Dulera Asthma Meds, John Deere, Progressive Insurance, Tostados, Burger King, Hershey, Honda, Direct TV, Nasacort Allergy Meds, Pizza Hut, Fuse Electric Cigarettes, Schick Razor, Supernatural Trailer, Corona, Jolly Rancher, Walk Among the Tombstones Trailer, AT&T, Ace Hardware, Toyota, Sonic, Reese’s Pieces, Dewar Whiskey, Gillette Razor, Cricket Wireless, State Farm, Heineken, Dunkin Donut, Winter soldier Trailer, Kit Kat, Allegra Allergy Meds, UFC, Heinz, Evel Knievel trailer, Cricket wireless, Wendy’s, ROLO, Honda, Direct TV, Maze Runner Trailer, ITT Tech, Dos Equis, KFC, Reese’s Pieces, Nasacort Allergy Meds, Fiat, Domino’s Pizza, Ice Breakers Breath Mints, Sonic, Skittles, Cricket Wireless, Lipton Tea, Kit Kat, Dos Equis, Walk Among the Tombstones Trailer, Eye Exam PSA, Lending Tree Loans, Scion, State Farm, Reese’s, UFC, Sons of Anarchy Trailer.
Is it just me or is this pure insanity. 72 commercials of varying lengths in just 120 minutes. There’s little doubt that these money hungry cable companies will eventually supply us with only 10 minutes of actually programming per hour if we just agree to watch 50 minutes of effing commercials. Is it any wonder that we can’t just sit down and relax anymore. Even if the TV is off the radio chimes in with their commercials. Signs along the roads and on thousands of vehicles driving by make it impossible to escape.
Try and enjoy your day.
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Everyday seems like an adventure to me and not always in a good way. I constantly people watch like everyone else but most things that make me the craziest occur in retail stores, specifically at the checkouts. I worked for retail companies for almost twenty years and hated every minute of it. Companies are always preaching "Good Customer Service" but it never seems to happen. The reason is simple. You need good people as customers to start with. Here’s a partial list of recent things that make me want to scream and run from the building.
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Store Checkout Lines – Just once I’d love to get into a checkout line and be rung out immediately and leave smiling and happy. I’ve been waiting for that for decades but it never seems to occur. It’s always the wrong lane for me. I could have one guy in front of me with six items and as soon as I line up behind him the cashier has to page for a price check or has to send an employee back into the store for a price because no one responded to the damn page. If it’s like this for everyone else then we have an even a bigger problem than I first thought.
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Express Lanes – Don’t even get me started. Fourteen items or twenty items, it doesn’t matter how many. I guarantee the person in front of me will have fifty freaking items. If you say something then you’re the asshole. If you don’t then you end up being pissed off all day and taking it out on someone else either in another store or at home.
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Line Jumpers – The store opens a new register when your third in line at a busy one. Before you can react, the people five places behind you in your line dash to the new register. I have a new term for you to mull over, "Store Rage". It’s these little things that begin to accumulate over the months and result in bigger and more interesting arguments at the most inopportune times.
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English Speaking Cashiers – I love diversity as much as the next guy but you can’t hire people who don’t know the language of the customers they’re taking care of. Simple right? I guess not. Part of the problem is that out of every five cashiers hired, four either fail the background check or the drug test.
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Chatty Cashiers – I hate to say this but they’re normally a chubby women in her fifties who wants to be everyone’s best friend and confidant. She spends more time yakking about stupid stuff than checking your purchases out. Please, shut the hell up, smile, and get me the hell out of the store.
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Stupid Customers- Don’t show up at the registers with a bunch of products that are either missing bar codes or price tags. Don’t ask the cashiers to do price checks for you while there are twenty people in line behind you. Could someone be any more ignorant? It happens all the time.
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Coupon Freaks – I love nothing better than being behind a women with forty items in her cart and a stack of thirty coupons that must be checked individually. The only thing worse is when the cashier discovers that more than half of the coupons are outdated or the customer is trying to scam her using incorrect products. Do your freaking shopping at three in the morning for God’s sake where you take all the time you like sorting through your bag full of coupons and the women with Food Stamps behind you can just wait. She’s probably just buying booze and cigarettes anyway.
I could continue this rant for another thirty paragraphs but I hope you’re getting my point. This posting was prompted by my last twenty visits to Walmart, Target, Kohl’s, and a host of others. I actually feel a lot better after venting like this but it’ll start building again as soon as I go shopping the next time. I really don’ t anticipate any improvement so expect another posting just like this in September. It’ll take that long to really piss me off again.
The straw that broke my back this time came to my attention from my better-half who still works for a major retailer. She’s front-end manager who’s required to babysit a large group of girls (not women) in their late teens and early twenties who really don’t want to work. They apparently live for drinking, partying, and screwing everyone they can get their hands on. The turnover is high as you’d expect but hiring really good employees is difficult when they pay slave wages. They recently hired a cashier who barely spoke English and who didn’t understand our monetary system. And they wonder why their customers are outraged when a cashier can’t make the correct change even after the register tells her how much it is.
I won’t even start with my experiences with the bastards using cell phones and texting while I wait impatiently in line behind them. Kill me I’m begging you.
Thank God for Amazon, Ebay, and Internet shopping.
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First we had Black Friday and the week long barrage of advertisements that preceded it. The bombardment was brutal as always and made it virtually impossible for me to comfortably watch TV, listen to the radio, or read my emails. Spam was worse than usual on the net and there was just no let up. Some time Friday afternoon I expected some relief when the end of Black Friday was in sight. Wrong! Visiting a few stores during that week was a huge disappointment for me too. In years past the Christmas holiday really didn’t take off until the weekend following Black Friday, but no more. For example, Lowes was setting Christmas displays two weeks before Black Friday and I can only assume they were following the example set by the Big Daddy retailer, Walmart. I was already sick of the Christmas season in late September with their slashed prices, great deals, giveaways, and enough coupons mailed to kill off a large forest. It was just plain stupid but I was certain it would soon decline in frequency. Wrong again.
I wake up bright and early on Sunday and the barrage had changed focus. It’s now the beginning of the ramp up to Cyber Monday. I wonder what genius thought up that pain-in-the-ass promotion. Chances are good it was a combination of people from Best Buy, Apple, and of course Amazon. My mail box was suddenly filled anew with another round of nonsense. The old Circuit City brand that closed it’s retail establishments five years ago is now alive and well as an internet business and returned once more to bother me. Prices were being lowered again and again with the drumbeat continuing on both television and radio. I was forced to abandon electronic media for a day or two and just sit quietly and read a good book.
Monday arrived and again I was hoping for a reprieve from the advertising onslaught with the end of the Cyber Monday debacle. Wrong again. Late Monday I began hearing a new phrase being bandied about, Cyber Week! These effing people are relentless in their need to make most of us as miserable and brainwashed as possible. Maybe next year November can become Cyber Month and Christmas resets can begin in August. This country is on advertising overload and has been for quite some time. I recall a time when cable TV was first introduced and they called it Pay TV. We were assured that with the advent of cable we could watch television commercial-free for just a small monthly payment. That claim lasted about a week before they began to clog the new cable airways with ads and began jacking up the monthly fee.
I sat with a stop watch one evening earlier this year and decided to determine how much time was spent on actual TV programming. In a standard one half hour sitcom we’re being force-fed approximately ten minutes of boring, annoying, and stupid advertisements. That means for a two hour movie special we are fed forty minutes of ads. It won’t be long before what used to be an hour special will become a three and a half hour advertising fiasco. When will it end? I think the answer to that would be “Never”.
We aren’t permitted any ad free time to sit and think about anything but spend, spend, spend. Walmart seems to be the trend setter in all things retail and it doesn’t take long for Target, Best Buy, and all of the others to follow suit. Walmart is constantly in our face on TV and upon arrival at their stores you’ll find endless numbers of signs posted everywhere. You enter the building and there are signs for the Donut Shop, Pharmacy, Bank, Eyeglasses, Beauty Shop and even Nail Salons. The entire building is covered in signs for just about every product they carry. Their latest and greatest devices to drive me crazy are those little LCD screens located on end-caps that activate as you approach. Another sales pitch for some bullshit useless product I didn’t want to begin with. My first introduction to those little devices scared the crap out of me as I was walking along minding my own business and all of a sudden I have a female voice bellowing at me to buy some stupid product I really didn’t need. Criminally annoying.
My rant is over for now. The problem with all of these advertisements is two fold. First, they seem to work which gives the companies incentive to continue using them and second, it gives them the power to manipulate large numbers of the population to do their bidding. As always my bitch about the Media in general is their constant attempts to control not only politics in this country but everything else as well. If that doesn’t give you pause and scare you a little then we’ve already lost the battle.
I’m leaving now because I feel the need to scream and then run to Walmart and buy something stupid. Merry Effing Christmas!
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