The wicked witch of Halloween’s corpse had hardly shed a degree of body temperature before stores started hawking Christmas goodies this year, much to my chagrin. I know Christmas is the season where retailers really make their money for the year, but the way things are going these days, I’m expecting next year’s Christmas hysteria will start in June. What’s worse, consumer product manufacturers are really struggling to identify new markets for consumers and coming up with some truly crap gift ideas.
For example, consider this value proposition: it’s Christmas and you’re away from home, working hard at a customer site. Why not bring a little Christmas cheer into your life with a USB LED Christmas light? Are they insane? I swear, it’s like consumers are desperate to burn their money: “Sure, yearly savings as a percentage of post-tax earnings are in negative territory in the US, but I gots ta get me a glowing fake Christmas tree to plug into my computer!”
Even worse are the gifts people buy other people. I swear, a significant portion of Earth’s natural resources are sitting in a closet somewhere just because someone felt they needed to buy a Remington Shaver for that hairy relative they don’t really like. At the bottom of the barrel-of-consumer-shame is those products that aren’t actually designed to be used. You know the gifts I’m talking about, those gag gifts where the majority of the product’s value is the gag of giving them to someone.
Example: Does anyone really need a Dead Bug Funeral Kit? How about a Hipster Handbook? I mean, if the bug is dead, a dignified burial isn’t going to change anything; and if you’re a hipster, why would you need a manual? Unless, of course, you’re actually trying to be a hipster, in which case you need more than a book to help you.
The moral of this Christmas story is simple: stop shopping big and start thinking big.
It’s been a bit hectic, what with the final two weeks of the MBA approaching, but somewhere in there I managed to download iTunes for Windows. A millionth of a second after launching the newly-installed application, I proceeded to uninstall WinAmp, saying my goodbye quickly so as not to betray my lack of emotion at its departure from my hard-drive. You know Apple is onto something when not only am I deleting the first application I’ve installed on any new machine for the past five years, but even my mother-in-law is looking at buying an iPod.
Now, I’m not one to advocate or admit to mass copyright piracy via a public medium, so let’s just say that I have a sizable digital music collection and leave it at that. But, needless to say, iTunes makes my music addiction a bit more manageable. I can sort! I can shuffle! I can even track which songs I really like, in case I get smacked in the head and forget! It’s lovely. Other people apparently think so too. While pretending to get some work done in the university library, I fired up iTunes only to be surprised by the number of other computers sharing out their music using the application’s built-in streaming capabilities. As Inspector Gadget said to Penny: Yowza!
The most interesting part about trawling through other people’s iTunes libraries is observing the variety of music to which people listen: Mozart, Pink, AC/DC, Britney Spears, Oscar Peterson, and so on. And that’s on one machine. People are shamelessly mixing and matching musical genres in their playlists with wild abandon - crazy! It’s refreshing to see so much variety in people’s musical tastes, even if some of the combinations are liable to make them as sick as a drink made from Scotch, Vodka, and Gin and served from an unclean toilet bowl. To those musical pioneers who are about to mix Joni Mitchell with a side of AC/DC and some Pavarotti: I salute you!
Apparently, my acceptance for this musical cross-breeding is not shared by all, and the latest Apple-inspired revolution has an ugly name: playlistism. That’s right, we’ve reached the level of social sophistication where judging a person on the basis of race, gender, religion, nationality, and political affiliation is not enough. We’ve pushed the boundary: now we can judge you by your previously-secret addiction to kitschy show tunes! Point and laugh everybody!
