I Remain Unimpressed

Today’s item is stupid on not just one level, but two–a regular you- got- your- chocolate- in- my- peanut- butter- type mash-up of two wonderful ideas that go great together. And by “wonderful,” I mean “really, really stupid.”

I’m talking, of course, about Best Buy’s vending machine in the A concourse of the Las Vegas airport (see crappy photo, right).

Stupidity No. 1: Best Buy’s marketing geniuses (genii?) designed this thing to sell iPods and whatnot to people not only dopey enough to have left their music players on the plane they just got off of, but also moronic enough to decide, 100 yards later, that they should shell out for a new one, rather than walk back to the gate and retrieve their old one. To say nothing of the fact that if you’re not packing a laptop full of music and iTunes, a brand-new iPod in an airport is the functional equivalent of a five-pound bucket of lard–it may be a bit lighter and more easily fit in an overhead bin, but with a dead battery and no songs, it’s every bit as useful as rendered pig fat.

Stupidity No. 2: You can also use this machine to buy–wait for it–gift cards! As we all know, gift cards are contemptible on their face–a marketing plan driven by overt hope that you’re suggestible enough to want to restrict your money to one store, and the unspoken dream that you won’t use all the money that you or some other dope put on it. After all, every customer who leaves a dollar on the card before losing it in the back of the junk drawer is a potential patsy–and a profitable one at that.

But the real problem is worse: I mean, who the hell needs a Best Buy gift card at the Las Vegas airport? The nearest Best Buy is not only on the other side of a security checkpoint that takes 70 minutes to get through, but also a 15-mile cab ride away. I can think of a few places where a Best Buy gift card is less useful, but most of them are in sub-Saharan Africa. Go fish.

So, what have we created here? A machine aimed at the peanut-buttery center of your weak-kneed desire for an impulse purchase, enrobed in the chocolate-covered dissatisfaction of delayed gratification, since it’s thoughtfully placed where you can’t possibly use what it sells. Impressive.

For this, Best Buy earns the coveted double-whammy. To badly paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi, “The only thing sadder than the fool who put this thing in the airport is the fool who uses it.” Please, don’t be that fool.

Me? I remain unimpressed.

"I know! We can target bulimics!"

Today’s morons? The dopes who put together Bed Bath & Beyond’s latest sales flyer (crappy cellphone pic at right).

Turns out that the store in which no heterosexual male would be caught dead has (to quote the Blues Brothers movie) “both kinds” of products: Those for binging and purging!

Just in case you were worried that Bed Bath & Bulimic didn’t have the sweet tang of passive and the salty snap of aggressive covered, the company’s latest attempt to make you forget that the economy has not only circled the toilet bowl like an errant turd, but also flushed through and left unsightly brown claw-marks that require the vigorous application of a bristly brush, clearly proves the marketing department thinks its shoppers are bi-polar buffoons.

Alongside pictures of $40 and $80 chafing dishes and $35 tiny-food trays, all heaping with Queen-Latifah-sized portions of food for your piehole, is a picture of a pair of feet on a $60 scale. The food pictures all carry the headline “yumm,” while the scale carries the headline “YIKES!”

Just in case you’re too stupid to get the “joke,” (and I can assure you that the marketing geniuses at Bed Bath & Bile think you have the IQ of a sandwich) the scale reads “UH-OH.”

Now, which buttons, exactly, is this supposed to push?

I guess they figure I’m going to run out and buy all their food-preparation crap, use it to pack my colon full, then step on their scale and freak the hell out–all the while knowing that this incredible circle of self-loathing was calculatedly premeditated by the people who sold me this junk in the first place?

Riiiight. Now how, exactly, is that supposed to make me feel good about parting with my rapidly withering disposable income while my 401(k) does its impression of a Japanese Zero dead-aiming the U.S.S. Arizona? Anyone with enough of a brain to recognize a mirror and fog it can answer this question easily: It’s not.

You guessed it: I remain unimpressed.