MattMaroon.com

I was reading this hatchet job from Reuters about Starbucks because, well, I’m a glutton for intellectual punishment. It’s about how Starbucks has been experimenting with stores using other branding, trying to go for a more local feel.

This article posits that “Perhaps consumer really do want something more than branded artifice; they want something genuinely local.”  Bullshit.

This is wishful thinking on the part of people with a fetish for local mom-and-pop businesses. They write the same victory speeches on their LiveJournals every time one Wal-Mart moves out of a neighborhood, despite the fact that for every instance of that hundreds more move in.

Starbucks is facing attacks on all sides. They’ve got Peet’s and Caribou growing quickly. They’ve got McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts both heavily promoting their coffee lines these days. They’ve got the fact that they drastically overbuilt in the first place (though I thank them for it, as it inspired what was quite possibly the greatest standup comedy bit of all time) coupled with a double-digit unemployment rate that makes people think twice about that daily $5 cup of joe.

True, they do have local coffee shops improving the quality of their offerings as a direct response to Starbucks. Unlike retail, which is all about using volume to reduce costs while retaining a thin sliver of a profit margin, it’s not nearly so hard for local businesses to compete in an industry with 1,000% markup. The fact that they have to buy their coffee for 20% more than the chains is virtually irrelevant.

But people don’t give a shit about locality or being different, at least not enough people to matter. They all eat at Fridays and Olive Garden and shop at Wal-Mart and Target. Hell, go to any public place and at least 75% of people are wearing pants made of the same fabric and in the same color. Seinfeld once joked that we all ought to wear the same thing, the way aliens always do in sci-fi movies. Well, we haven’t settled on the shirt yet but we’re half way there.

So it’s hard for me to believe that a nation full of people who all own at least 4 pairs of blue jeans really worry about sameness when it comes to buying a latte. That’s just wishful thinking on the part of people resistant to change.

I don’t know where mom-and-pop stores got this recent mystique, but the whole fetish is just the modern equivalent of tilting at windmills. Thankfully it’s relegated largely to blogs and drum circles too, because I do love my Venti Apple Chai Latte.

Neat story on The Smoking Gun on the case of a cop who tackled a Critical Mass cyclist. I’m conflicted about that one. On one hand, saying I don’t like cops would be an understatement (though in fairness, I realize they’re necessary and view them more as the symptom than the problem) and I really don’t like the idea of cops beating people and lying about it.

On the other hand, I like cops a hell of a lot more than Critical Mass douche bags, and support anyone beating them. They are urban terrorists, plain and simple. They jam up traffic causing untold stress on innocent civilians, often running through red lights and blocking the cars that have the green. For some reason that I cannot understand, city police departments often aid them and support the behavior, rather than busting them for one traffic violation after another.

I support people’s right to protest (though I think it’s slightly below “trying to explain method acting to Matthew McConaughey” on the list of productive ways to spend your time) but once you start making me late for stuff with it, all bets are off. Put your hippie bike in front of me when I have a green light and I’ll be billing you for the dent in my front bumper that, not coincidentally, is the same size and shape as your helmet.

I don’t know why, but I don’t care at all about people who are rude to me personally. But when people are rude to society in general I go into a blind range. Call me an ass, and I’ll just shrug it off. Stop and talk to your friend right in the doorway of a Whole Foods, and I’m liable to shank you. Or at least fantasize about it, since actually shanking you would mean I’d have to then talk to cops.

Most times I can keep a lid on my anger because I know that the people being rude to society aren’t doing it intentionally. They’re just too dumb to realize that other people exist. They realize it from some sort of logical sense. If you asked them “do other people exist?” they’d almost all say yes. But they don’t seem to realize, at a practical level, what that means. So they park their cart right in the middle of the aisle at the grocery store and wander off in search of something two aisles over, or take five minutes to fish their checkbook out of their purse at the cash register, or stop right in front of a driveway at a light when someone is clearly trying to get out. They have absolutely no self-awareness, no concept of the imprint they leave on society.

But even those people are tolerable, because they aren’t doing it on purpose. They’re not malicious, they’re just stupid. Critical Mass participants are both, and anything cops do to them is simply bettering the gene pool. So it’s a tough call.

Dear Time Warner Cable,

If you routinely bill someone with a due date of around the 27^th, and they pay on time every single month for three years, and then you change the billing date to the 16^th, don’t send them to collections if they haven’t paid by the 23^rd. Just call them. Chances are they auto-pay their bill on the 25^th and just didn’t notice the change.

Thanks,

Customer who will be switching to Fiber to the Home the second it is available in my area.

One funny thing about Californians is how pathetically they handle weather. Coming from Ohio, it’s downright humorous what happens here whenever it isn’t 75 and sunny.

If it gets down below 60 during the day, they start whining. If it hits 55, the winter coats and long johns come out. Oddly though, unlike anywhere else I’ve been, it can be 85 here at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and by 9 it’s in the high 40′s. That unusual temperature drop is nice because the locals stay inside and the traffic is less bad. It’s always varying degrees of awful, but as soon as the thermometer hits 60, it gets significantly less so as the Californians scramble for shelter.

And when there’s even the slightest rain all hell breaks loose. If they get three days of Ohio’s average April weather in San Fran you can row your boat to work. Apparently nobody here has ever heard of a drain. For any Californians reading, a drain is kind of like a manhole cover but with holes in it. Google it.

Even a little drizzle here causes rolling blackouts, and a 5 mile per hour wind seems to knock about 1 in 5 trees over, generally into the road, where they sit for weeks. They don’t seem to have anyone tasked with picking them up, and the neighbors sure aren’t going outside. In the Midwest we have such cleanup crews, but even though the weather is far more severe there they’re not really needed because our trees are made of wood. I’m pretty sure California trees are composed of Styrofoam.

I’m starting to hate Facebook. Seriously. For a long time I loved it. It’s like MySpace, but minus the “come see me naked on my webcam” spam (one nice thing about the subprime collapse is at least the mortgage spam has dried up), the two minute page load times, the annoying songs that play when the page finally does load, and the backgrounds that make text illegible. In fact, it was pretty much better in every conceivable way. Until they added apps.

Apps have ruined the whole site. Before it was like, you were hanging out with some friends, and maybe the topic of Facebook came up. And one of their douchey friends was like “what’s your email, I’ll add you.” So you’d give them your email, because what else are you going to do, and they’d friend you, and that was probably the end of it. Then a few weeks later, you’d unfriend them and hope they didn’t notice, or that you just never saw them again.

But now there are Facebook apps. So when your douchey friend of a friend adds you, they then proceed to bite you turning you into a werewolf, a vampire, a zombie, or some other mythical beast that just happens to spread memetically. Then they give you a few fish for your aquarium, a garden with a tomato plant and a mouse, a free gift (some crap like a pool floatie that you wouldn’t even use if it were real) and update their mini-feed to let everyone know that they’re going to the Green Day concert and they’re so excited. And all of their douchey friends do the same, bombarding your mini-feed with crap you don’t care about.

And you can’t just give said douches a fake email, they’ll just think “oh, he probably just forgot which email he uses there, I do that sometimes” and then find you on your mutual friend’s friends list. And you know you have to accept, because what if you see them again (and maybe there are some hot chicks in their profile to look at anyway) but can you maybe get away with only letting them see your limited profile? I mean, you def don’t want anyone you don’t really know who is already trying to bite you into zombieness getting your phone number, but then what if they’re like “dude, why did you limit me?” That could get uncomfortable.

Facebook should have an annoyance filter. Then I can get my mini-feed back to what it should be. All I want to see is when a friend adds another friend (in case it’s a hot chick, obv), when someone sends me something, and maybe a birthday or two.

Also, if Word auto corrects the word “douchey” to the word “douche” one more time, I’m throwing this laptop out the window.

If you work for the TSA, I hate you. I just thought you should know. And because you’re always so condescending to everyone, you should also know that you’re one rung up the socioeconomic status ladder from my dog. In fact, he routinely catches pests like moles that would otherwise be eating valuable crops, so he might actually contribute more to society than you do. As far as I can tell, all you do is make people throw away (and then presumably buy and replace) cigarette lighters. That’s your contribution to humanity, increasing Zippo’s quarterly profits by a fraction of a percent.

I’m sorry I forgot to take my goddamned shoes off, but it’s 7 in the freaking morning and I’m usually going to bed at this hour. Unlike you I don’t have a job pushing a button and pretending to look for guns that makes me wake up at that time. We can’t all be smart enough to check passports, because if we were, who would flip the burgers?

I have to give you points though, if I worked a job that a chimpanzee could probably do after a week of training, I wouldn’t have the balls to look down on every business traveler (who would probably make more in a week than I did in a year) who forgets that bottles of water are verboten. You do, though I’m sure you’d never phrase it that way because anyone who works for the TSA has probably never even heard the word “verboten”. Look it up.

Oh, and by the way, today I put a little travel sized container of lotion in my pocket and walked right through. And I had a bottle of Purell in the other one too. No Ziploc baggie either. Eat it sucker.

 

Maybe I’m just a mean person, but does anyone else get pissed when they read stuff like this? Some people go climbing up a mountain in the winter and get stuck and now everybody else’s tax dollars are spent trying to save them. How many tens of thousands of dollars is this particular search costing the people who were smart enough to not put themselves in life threatening situations?

I’m all for search and rescue teams in cases where somebody is accidentally stuck somewhere. The recent James Kim incident comes to mind. He and his family were just driving and got lost. That could happen to anybody. When stuff like that occurs please, by all means, use public money to put some fuel in the chopper and go looking.

But mountain climbing? No way. If you try to climb a mountain for no good reason (and really there hasn’t been any good reason to climb a mountain in this country in over a century) you deserve what you get. Why does part of my income have to go to rescuing morons like that? These people don’t value their lives enough to avoid doing something so dangerous, why should the rest of us value them enough to try to bail them out.

I don’t have anything against mountain climbers. I really can’t fathom what would make somebody want to do something so pointless, but hey, whatever floats your boat. And I also feel bad for the families and all. I just don’t want my money spent on other people’s stupid hobbies.

When people waste my money like that it sickens me. Every $20 spent is one extra hour that some average American who was smart enough to not climb a frozen rock has to work rather than spend time with their family or friends. Why? Because some nutjobs really wanted to see what it looks like from a few thousand feet up. Is it me, or is that wrong?

There should be some sort of mountain climbing insurance that will pay for a private team to rescue you if you’re lost, and if you don’t have that, well, best of luck. And if the local sherriff doesn’t feel like explaining to the hysterical families why we the people aren’t going to foot the bill for their relatives’ idiotic hobbies they can pass the phone to me. I’ll be more than happy.

I think the award for the worst corporate slogan of all time has to go to Rally’s. For those fortunate enough to have never been to one, Rally’s is an exceptionally lackluster hamburger chain that uses the line “You gotta eat!” in all of their advertisements.

Is that really the best their marketing team could come up with? They really can’t give me any reason to buy my food from them other than the fact that I have to buy food somewhere? They can’t tell me they have tasty burgers? Or tell me they’re cheaper than McDonalds? Nope, they just point out my biological processes. I know I gotta eat, that was the first thing I figured out in this world. I just have no idea why I’d do it at Rally’s. And until they at least attempt to convince me, I wont.

Second place goes to the grocery chain Giant Eagle (also second on the list of the dumbest corporation names, and my next post will probably be about the new champion there) with their slogan “It Takes A Giant To Make Life Simple”. Huh? Didn’t they ever read nursery rhymes as a kid? All giants do is sleep all day and eat people, BFG excepted. And even he was kind of a tool, abducting little girls and farting all of the time. That’s not what I’d want people to associate my stores with.

Please, any corporations out there thinking up a new slogan, run them by me first. I offer my consulting services free of charge. I’ll gladly work for nothing just to ensure I never have to hear anything as idiotic as “you gotta eat” on the radio or television again.

Not too long ago my bank sent me a replacement debit card, as they do every couple years, for the one I was using. I dialed the little activation number, threw out the old one, and then stuck the new one in my wallet.

A couple days later I was at the Giant Eagle, our local grocery mega-chain and my vote for the dumbest name ever, which says a lot for a someone in an industry led by such dumbassly named stores as Piggly Wiggly and Food Lion. Come to think of it, that superlative is almost equal in magnitude to “white-trashiest guest on the Jerry Springer Show” or “least competent person working in the White House”.

So I went to check out and handed the cashier my shiny new debit card. I use it as a credit card (rather than doing the PIN transaction) because my bank gives me one cent back for every $800,000 I spend that way. He flipped it over and said “there’s no signature on this card.” I didn’t really see how that would prevent it from working, but I decided to humor him and asked “do you have a pen?”

He said “I have to see your driver’s license.” I asked why and he said that it was store policy to verify the identity of anyone who hadn’t signed their card. So apparently to whoever sets their cashier policies (probably the same dumbass who named the place Giant Eagle) a signature is as valid a form of ID as a driver’s license.

What if everything worked that way? How great would America be? Picture a teenager in a liquor store.

“Can I see your ID?”

“No, but I can sign a piece of paper that says I’m 21.”

“Ok. Would you like some cigarettes with that?”

Really, do these people think that they are going to put a dent in credit fraud by checking the IDs of only people who didn’t sign their card? Counting replacements I might have gotten 50 of these things in the last 10 years and I’ve never signed one until some jackass cashier forced me to. But I bet if I stole one from someone’s mailbox that would be the first thing I’d do. I’m only theorizing here, as I have a pretty firm policy against doing anything that might land me in jail for 25 years, but I’m sure most of the people who don’t have that same inhibition would at least figure that much out. And even if they didn’t, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be wasting their short window of fraudulent opportunity in Giant Eagle buying $12 worth of ground beef, sour cream, and toothpaste.

So if you work in a grocery store, don’t be a dick. If someone gives you a credit card just take the damned thing, signed or not. It’s not like your managers are sending our secret shoppers with unsigned cards just to bust you. They’re too busy sitting in the break room eating free donuts from the bakery and wondering where their life went wrong to even notice. If you want to help stop credit fraud (or just get paid twice as much) get a job at Best Buy and card the people who buy 50″ plasmas with their Visas whether they’re signed or not and let me buy my cottage cheese in peace.