Did you know that if you make more that fifty dollars per day, you are in the top 20 percent of wage earners on the entire planet?
Think about that little nugget of information the next time you see a commercial featuring Americans treating thousand-dollar phones like they are Bic lighters; dropping them, putting them through the laundry, etc. A $1000 iPhone is more than two months' salary for eighty percent of the Earth's population. It's a regularly upgraded, disposable item for the target audience of this ad.
And those people who make less than fifty dollars per day? Well, some of them include the children who put in 12-hour shifts assembling phones like these. Fortunately, they'll never see this ad. I'm sure the wounds are painful enough without having salt sprinkled into them.
Ok, so offer soft drinks all day, every day for $1 any size. But if you aren't really trying to murder the country (and bury us in plastic trash,) could you maybe give us refillable cups without lids and straws, and put an ounce limit on those cups?
Also- I'm really worried about people who are drinking giant Cokes from Wendy's at 7:45 AM. A massive sugar rush in the morning is a recipe for ravenous hunger throughout the day. Is that the plan, Wendy's? Figure at least some of those "starving" people seeking to reclaim that sugar high will be back for "food" later- along with another $1 drink?
7:45 Coke, 11:30 Sprite, 4:30 Fanta, 8:00 Diabetes. Way to be part of the problem, Wendy's.
1. I imagine that the average dolphin has a longer attention span than the current generation of idiot Americans who surf everything except waves.
2. I don't care how many games you can watch at the same time with NFL Sunday Ticket, there is zero reason why any of them should be the Dolphins.
3. Maybe you could be doing something other than trying to watch four games at once while warming your backside on that couch. I've noticed a lot of deals on Peloton being aired during commercial breaks along with this ad. Just a thought.
This time, we see an adorable girl who for some reason waited until literally the last second to send her Wish List to Santa, probably because she knows that everyone in her life will bend over backwards to turn that frown upside down/ avoid the inevitable (but, again, adorable) tantrum that might come if Our Special Princess is disappointed for more than three consecutive seconds.
So we see the entire family get in on the act of Promoting Harmony Uber Alles, with Uncle Somebody Who Obviously Has No Children of His Own attempting to pull a I'll Deliver Your Letter to the North Pole with my Own LookatMeMobile Don't You Fret Precious Darling but having the letter snatched out of his hands by an Evil Wind which really ought to be biting the skin of some poor working slob and leaving the .001 percent alone.
Fortunately, the contents of the letter was read by someone who has no respect for the Little Girl's privacy but a steely determination to avoid a scene on Christmas Morning, so the piano Entitled Little Angel asked for is delivered safe and sound to Mommy and Daddy's ridiculous mansion in the mountains, where there is always a blanket of snow outside for these holidays because the local ski resort has machines for such things if nature doesn't do it's damn job and pony up. Man is this relatable or what?
And it's not even Thanksgiving yet. Strap in, folks.
Clueless Male Boss calls an employee who is NOT ON THE CLOCK to ask "where are those files," and for some reason Brilliant Fun Female Employee feels compelled to not only answer the phone, but to "isolate" the conversation so that Clueless Male Boss can't hear the horrible antics of the sixteen Cool Friends Being As White As Humanly Possible she's carting around for some reason in her ridiculously oversized LookAtMeMobile.
Personally, I would not have answered the phone at all. This woman is not at work. It looks like she and her friends are dressed up for a night on the town. Obviously the job pays good money, but I don't think it pays enough to make her available 24/7. But even if I did answer the phone, I wouldn't spend five seconds worrying about the guy on the other hand hearing my friends singing- and this "isolation" feature is 100 percent for the benefit of the person on the other end of the line; it doesn't do a thing to help the driver not hear the apparently-already-drunk idiots in the back while she's trying to hear the call.
Naturally, the files are in Clueless Male Boss's desk, which I guess is a little better than finding out that they are ON his desk or in his left hand; I would not have been even the slightest bit surprised if either were the original punchline before the writers decided to tone it down a bit. One problem solved, but one problem remains: I am more than a little concerned that the driver is clearly very eager to be distracted from maneuvering her Infinite Conspicuous Consumption Ego Purchase, be it by turning around to grin at her idiot friends or by taking phone calls from Clueless Male Boss. Keep your eyes and your brain on the road, stupid woman. Especially when you are driving a vehicle that looks like it could crush the small village the monthly payments could have fed.
Look, I get that colonoscopies aren't fun to prep for and we all have much, much better things to do than drink disgusting liquid, sit on the toilet, and then go through a procedure that is really, really nasty if we think about it for more than five seconds and which leaves us exhausted and depressed no matter what the test results are. But can we please all just get a grip? Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, the procedure is also 100 percent covered by insurance. It's extremely important for early screening of colon cancer, and is only necessary once every ten years as long as the test comes up clean.
(Not that you're going to convince me that this guy doesn't have a primary care provider and plenty of medical insurance. Give me a break.)
In other words, maybe it's something we shouldn't avoid just because it's a dreadful 72 hours or so out of our lives once a decade. Maybe it's not something we should cut corners on. Maybe it's not something that should take a back seat to convenience. Not to mention- if the test comes back positive, you are advised to get an actual colonoscopy. Which is exactly the same advice I'd give you if your test came back negative.
I'm not going to clean my own teeth or fill my own cavities. If I ever decide I want to jump out of an airplane, I'm not going to try to save a few bucks with a gently-used parachute off Facebook Marketplace. When I go for therapy, I'll go for therapy- and that means, I'm not checking out Better Health because it's more "easy" and "convenient." And when it comes to cancer screenings, I'm not taking the easy way out with this stupid nonsense. I think life's too short, but if there's a market for this stuff, that means there's plenty of guys out there who think that life isn't short enough.
*Frank Sinatra died of bladder cancer, by the way. I wonder how far along it was before it was detected.
Black Friday ads are successful when they convince us that we would be stupid not to take advantage of a "bargain" and will deeply regret not taking advantage of that "bargain" in the allegedly very, very limited time that "bargain" exists. A truly successful ad will convince us to buy something we didn't even know we wanted and aren't at all sure we need because of the discounted price; if it looks like enough of a "steal," we'll buy it now and figure out whether we want or need it later. The IMPORTANT thing is to GET it before someone else does and we are left with that heavy blanket of regret that comes with the sense of Lost Opportunity. These days the cool kids call this Fear of Missing Out, or FOMO.
In short, the psychology of Black Friday is Buy Now, Think Later, and encourages to do something that Capitalism pretty much always encourages us to do- follow our first impulse, which is to consume. It's just sold to us more aggressively on the Friday after Thanksgiving. I know people who consider that day to be every bit as much a holiday as that Thursday of food, family and football which serves as Black Friday Eve.
On Black Friday, it's especially easy to forget an old piece of advice another part of the world: Two Indian Elephants for a quarter is a good deal, if you have a quarter and you need two Indian Elephants. Otherwise, not so much. But I imagine that a whole lot of people will be stocking up on Indian Elephants a few Fridays from now, because impulse buying is the favorite past time of people who can't stop complaining about inflation; square that circle if you can.
