Coles and IKEA recruiting through creative promotions

I have gotten into the spirit of ‘consumerism through children’ with the latest of Australian retailer, Coles', collectable series, which is promoting its new Harry Potter range. 

The Coles Magical Builders are cardboard cut-outs of all the characters from the Harry Potter and the Fantastic Beasts cashcow empires, with the catch (for grown-ups) is you have to assemble them yourself. They come separately swathed in tiny tough cardboard flatpacks with instructions for their assembly on a tiny piece of paper. It’s like miniature IKEA. The instructions are impossible to see and also not terribly helpful but I am also impressed that they produce so little paper wastage.

With a resolve to demonstrate that I have the dexterity and cognitive function of a six year old, I decided to put one together. As it turns out, only tiny fingers can pop out the tiny cardboard fragments of arms and legs and owl wings and wizard beards. 

As ever with activities that are designed for children, I generally require child supervision to work out how to troubleshoot, but not on this occasion! I stabbed those diminutive suckers out using a sharp kitchen knife.

I’m guessing Coles aren’t considering my requirements in their customer base. Speaking of IKEA and companies that know their base, the Swedish megabrand have recently put “career instructions” inside their IKEA products that are labelled “how to assemble your furniture” in a push to recruit people who use IKEA products, which resulted in thousands of applicants and a whole bunch of people were hired who liked and used IKEA products. Hire your brand’s current customers and ambassadors  – good idea. What would also be a good idea would be to put in these boxes ‘how to actually assemble your furniture – like, some actual instructions”. Anyway.

So perhaps, with that in mind, and with the ol’ tradie shortage around areas of Australia that aren’t currently undertaking emergency disaster restorations, Coles perhaps should be looking for future tradies and engineers through this current tiny cardboard promotion. 

If you can assemble the tiny Ron Weasley character without the instructions (or even with the instructions) and you’re only seven, of if can assemble it to put Dumbledore’s head on his knees (but deliberately), then you have just won yourself a fast-tracked carpentry career. Very fast-tracked. Faster than a speeding Japanese superman bullet train. Anyway, there’s some foods for your thoughts, Coles. 

Ah, Christmas shopping

Christmas really is simply the most wonderful time of the year...

Providing you stay away from shopping centres and all of the people.  Shopping centres at Christmas are proof that misery and despair are accessible to anybody.  The public suck at the best of times, but they reserve a little extra something for the festive season.

I love how we commemorate the birth of a man who pleaded with us to eschew personal possessions by trampling each other half to death in the hopes of snagging the last Teenage Pregnancy Barbie at Target. Seeking salvation - you're doing it wrong, shopping anarchists.

And the person who came up with the phrase the customer is always right has obviously never worked with customers.

Having previously worked in a hotel chain, I can say with confidence that when a disgruntled customer thinks they are right, they are usually wrong, and a freakin' nut job, and would be banned from the establishment if I had my way.

Also, I don't understand the desperate need to get the parking spot closest to the door.  I imagine some people could do with a little wander from their car to the food court.

Getting the closest park doesn't make you special.  And you don't have a parking angel who gets you a good spot near the door, because celestial beings have nothing better to do than hover around your shit mobile and make sure you get a fabulous parking spot.

And how about the shop assistants in David Jones?  I believe some of the largest sticks known to man are shoved permanently up their backsides.  These people used to be required to think and calculate basic math equations in their head, old school style, but it looks like their sole duties now consist of glaring at you with disdain for daring to approach their counter, interrupting their Facebook status update and waving objects over a scanner until it beeps.  Liaising with these people equals slow death.  Thank goodness for online shopping.

Ironically, the shops that are the least annoying are the ones where you leave your standards, taste and any measure of class at the door - the $2 shops.  This is where you can buy all manner of faux-marble Greek and Roman statuary and cheap whore cosmetics.  Fortunately the pretentious gits of the world refuse to ever be seen in these stores.

Oh, and effing baby strollers.  These mini humvees are apparently designed to ensure your baby can survive an encounter with a herd of charging wildebeest.  While I can understand mothers of small, screaming little people being a tad cranky in the mall, what's everyone else's excuse at this most jolly time of the year?

Even if you aren't forced to liaise with humanity on your shopping trip, they may still get you through the air conditioning system, which kindly regifts the disgusting, contagious pathogens of hundreds of people as a present to you.

Merry Christmas!

Cyber Browsing

I've been trying to get interested in the whole internet shopping thing, and it's not going terribly well.  I find shopping in the real world to be a bit of a slow death, let alone in the cyber world.  A waste of one or two perfectly good hours looking at stuff while shuffling along at an infuriatingly slow pace through a retail outlet the size of the Pentagon.  Shopping is tediously boring at the best of times, and it seems that the cyber version isn't terribly interesting to me either. 

Although, at least in the cyber world you don't have to put up with apathetic retail assistants.  Things have changed alot since the glory days of retailing, when specialised salespeople would inform customers about the merits of a given product with an air of servitude and grace.  These days you have to deal with shop biatches who avoid eye contact in fear of having to actually assist you, or worse, are so perky and lively you just want to give them a smack in the back of the head. 

And then they try to sell you clothing items of high quality, which means they are designed to wear out in eight months instead of six.  And shopping online also means you don't have to put up with trying to negotiate your way through a sea of baby strollers, which are pushed fervently through the mall, and are apparently designed to ensure your child can survive a sudden and unexpected encounter with a herd of charging wildebeest. 

So women all around me have been banging on about their online shopping purchases; wearing faux fur coats from New York and red boots from Swaziland, or somewhere similar to that but probably a place that has a functioning economy, thus the ability to ship clothes to women all over the globe.

Anyway, I do believe I have just failed at online shopping.  This evening I spent a good eighteen minutes or so browsing the websites Google decided met my exacting search criteria; that being online shopping.  I looked through about thirty identical looking t-shirts on one site before I decided that I would prefer to stick a hot poker in my eye rather than look at any more.  How does one find anything they are looking for? 

Scrolling down the sidebar under Styles, I was offered timeless, contemporary, bohemian rhapsody, modern romance, disco fever, and casual.  Casual!  Yes, I know what casual is.  Let's go there.  I found the Style: What's this? tab to be particularly unhelpful.  Under casual tops, I could choose from knits and tees, blouses and button-down shirts (what's the difference?), tanks and camis (difference?), polos, sweaters, fashion hoodies, blazers or rompers in ruffles, silk, cotton, loose boatneck, assymetrical, rayon, blah, blah, blah.

Most of these websites are user friendly.  When I say user friendly, I mean completely infuriating.  And the FAQ section is always special.  Neither questions nor frequently asked, this is the section of the web site that compiles all the spin the company wants to snowball you with in one convenient location.  Question: What is the preferred customer discount plan?  Answer: Duh, an opportunity for us to assist you in hemorrhaging money. 

Who the hell has the time to follow fashion anyway? Probably about six people in the world. Which might explain why runway models are always wearing some of the weirdest crap, none of which ever makes it to your local retail outlets.

Apple - the technology and the fruit

How much is that apple in the window? We all know that there is muchos overpricing of technology and fruit in the retail sector.  Australian fruitgrowers are battling floodwaters, but what’s Gerry Harvey from Harvey Norman's excuse?

Harvey, head of the Harvey Norman retail chain, has been blithering over the past few days (years) about the indecency of Australian shoppers who are choosing to desert his overpriced retail outlets in droves to shop online for products that are often a third of his asking price.

The Canberra Times reports that Gerry Harvey has made a sanctimonious emotional plea in an attempt to hoodwink the public – as usual – into thinking that he’s just a retailer trying to make a living. Harvey is upset that 17-year-old’s are calling him most unflattering names. Yes, the teenage mutant's are angry, but many of them don’t have the emotional maturity to get their message across in a way that doesn’t sound crude.

My question is this: why the hell is the head of a billion dollar mega-empire spending his time reading comments about himself on Facebook and Twitter? Well, he’s probably not, and he doesn’t really give two hoots.

Nobody is coming into Harvey’s chain anymore because the consumer has realised that it’s just plain uneconomical to do so. He seems to be constantly baffled by the news that the majority of Australians think he’s being ripping them off for years. That this is news to Harvey demonstrates how out of touch he is with the retail sector and consumer demands.

The game is up Gerry. Whether you like it or not, consumers have oodles of choice now, and we choose to abandon your outlets, for the most part, and browse the global online supermarket; a bandwagon that you should have jumped on years ago. Wonder if he still thinks online selling is a waste of time.

Rather than come out and apologise for his embarrassing outbursts, Harvey chose to make the situation about himself, to garner public sympathy, and to distract us from the fact that he’s going to continue to trade as per usual, which is years behind the retail trend.