Hey Jake from State Farm- maybe get back to work?

I'm in the market for a new car; I'll probably be buying one within the next thirty days.  Since I've had rental insurance from State Farm for more than a quarter of a freaking century, I thought I'd give them a call to let them know and get a quote because, you know, this bundling thing and discounts I've been beaten over the head with hearing about Like Forever.

I left a message with my local State Farm agent, whose name I will not mention- THIS time.  I'll try to call again on Monday.  If I can't get someone on the phone or get a voicemail answered, I'll have to assume that Jake is just too busy blowing smoke up Pat Mahomes' ass* to bother with little old Loyal Customer Me.  And I'll have to publicize the name of my asleep-at-the-wheel agent as the reason I called that idiot with the Emu to ask about coverage.  For both my apartment AND my new car, because I'm pretty sure those guys are into bundling too.  

P.S. not one viewer in 100 remembers that Fumblerino skit from the 1990s, and that one didn't want to be reminded. 

*which, to be fair, is probably still pretty sore after being slammed to the turf every few seconds during that big football game some weeks back.

If you need a Voom, you really just need a Broom

 

Seriously, this is a broom with a built-in dustpan which probably has to be emptied just as often as a dustpan.  A broom that costs $60.  I'm pretty sure that I can still get a broom at the local dollar store for under $10 and a dustpan for another buck or two.  

In short, this is just another As Seen on TV waste of money.  Dumb.

Meet the new Audi, but don't get too attached.....

 

1.  Audis are among the very worst automobiles when factoring in maintenance costs, reliability, and fuel consumption.  When they say "this is how much the Audi costs," they mean "this is how much it costs to drive it off the lot."  What they don't tell you is how much it costs to keep it on the road.  If you keep this car for a few years, it's going to be an ongoing expense but I guess maybe it doesn't matter to the targeted audience.  But what about the people who buy this car who aren't in the target audience?  Well....

2.  Audis are also among the most repo'd cars on the market.  Way, way too many people are being suckered into buying one of these LookAtMe Mobiles at interest rates soaring above 20%, falling behind on payments, and having their friendly neighborhood Repo guy show up and tow it back to the dealership (or the bank, if you actually had enough credit to avoid dealership financing.)  Which is kind of ironic, isn't it- you bought the car to show well for your neighbors, and now your neighbors are watching it being hauled off because you've been exposed as a Pretend-Rich Poser.  

--posting as a guy looking at a 2012 Honda Civic with a clean CarFax.  A 2012 Civic that has been repossessed twice.  Could I afford an Audi?  No.  Could I afford a brand-new Honda Civic?  Yep.  But that 2025 Honda Civic isn't built as well as the one manufactured in 2012 and contains bells and whistles that make the insurance on it much, much higher.  Nobody will stare at it at a red light, but seriously who cares?

I see no evidence that iPhone users are legitimately concerned with this

 

If you're so concerned with your privacy, why are you having stupid, loud conversations in public using these things?  Give me a break, you've been exhibiting your narcissism using iPhones for more than twenty years.   NOW you're worried about privacy?  I'm not buying it.

Oh wait.  This is just another pointless add-on designed to convince people that the iPhone they purchased for Xmas is now out of date and "needs" to be updated Just Tap Your Card Here.  Yeah, no.  I'm not buying THAT, either.

Nissan can't give us a single good reason to buy a Rogue. So we get this instead.

 

It's hard to imagine ad actors acting less naturally and more stilted than the ones featured in this ad for....well, let's hold that thought.

I mean, look at them.  Zombie Mom with the stupid smile frozen to her face just keeps talking to her car, asking it to do things she either doesn't really need done (does she really not know where the soccer field is?) or it can't do (what does she mean, "take us to the soccer field?"  It's not a self-driving car.  All it can do is give directions.  Guess what, Zombie Mom?  GPS is available on pretty much every car nowadays)  Oh, and she asks it to remind her to order pizza- something she could have asked Google to do from her phone.

Meanwhile, that stupid kid in the back just keeps laughing at something- from what we see, she seems to be laughing at her mother's constant commands for Google to remind her to blink every few seconds so she doesn't forget.  The kid looks to be a preteen, but not a toddler, and only a very small toddler would find her mother talking to Google and get responses funny.  Even a very small toddler would only find it funny two or three times. 

Let's get back to that first, interrupted thought.  What is this an ad for?  The only thing that is being sold is Google.  Nothing this woman does can't be done using her phone.  Why would anyone buy a 40k car from a rapidly failing company to get the exact same voice-activation assistance available from a refurbished Samsung phone available on Amazon?  And there's absolutely nothing else being pitched to us here- just the super-convenient, and apparently Super Fun, Google On Demand system which might have been revolutionary back in 2015 but is about as groundbreaking as SiriusXM today.

Someone please, tell me what I'm missing here.

What's in your wallet? Debt.*

 

In 2013, the average credit card interest rate was 13%, and anything above 19.9% was a sign that you had run into trouble paying bills and had a poor credit rating.  Today, the AVERAGE credit card interest rate is 26%- exactly double the average rate in 2013.  What happened?

It turns out that Capital One Bank is the main culprit.  In 2016, the world's largest extender of unsecured credit decided to experiment with higher interest rates, gradually raising interest on balances from 13% to 17% to 19% over the course of five years while also investing in glitzy commercials featuring actors, comedians and sports figures pimping the benefits of "cash back rewards," with a special emphasis on the use of credit to small business owners.  

The result?  Use of credit cards exploded even as the cost of using those cards rose.  Capital One had it's answer:  Americans like to spend, can easily be convinced that spending is a positive activity and even analogous to investment, getting one percent "cash back" is worth any amount of spending, and interest rates are basically meaningless.

It didn't hurt that wages continued to remain stagnant when matched up against inflation during the period 2013-present.  To continue to purchase the same thing year after year, more and more people must rely on unsecured loans from banks like Capital One.  And it's so easy- no conversations with judgmental people at the bank, not even a phone call.  Just take out that piece of plastic and you've got your gasoline, groceries or whatever else you want.

Today American adults carry an average of $7200 in credit card debt, $1.17 trillion in all, and that number is going up every quarter.  Much of that debt is on credit cards carrying interest rates of over 30%.  The entire economy is built on this debt- money that is PROJECTED to arrive through electronic transfer to Capital One and other banks- and on this debt GROWING every single year.  Every new product is presented to the public in the hopes that consumers are willing to go into a LITTLE MORE debt in order to possess it.  Which makes advertising more aggressive every single year- aggressive and expensive (you think these celebrities do these ads for free?) 

All of which keeps me busy with this blog.  Which is something, I guess.

*oh, and Fake Status.  Access to over 1300 Airport Lounges?  Who gives a damn?

Doritos Tells On Itself- and proves my previous point- in it's Superbowl Ad

 

1.  How did Doritos tell on itself?  Well, this particular snack "food" might just be the most engineered calorie delivery system in human history.  Everything about it- the shape, the size, the color (both of the chip and the bag,) the levels of crispiness and saltiness- is the result of literally DECADES of laboratory and focus group testing.  The final product is almost flawlessly designed to keep the consumer reaching into the bag until every single speck of every single chip is gone, and to keep the brain demanding more in a very short period of time.  It's edible heroin, basically, which lights up the pleasure center of the brain like a freaking Christmas Tree while providing nothing of value to it or any other organ (but certainly contributing to the growth of adipose tissue.)

So when we get a minute-plus of "this stuff is a scientific miracle" from a comedian who hasn't done anything of value since The Spoils of Babylon more than a decade ago.  

2.  How did this commercial prove a previous point?  Well, the week before the Big Game I noted that two things we could definitely expect from the ads were that they would feature familiar faces- old actors or comedians we had not seen for a while,*  and that they would be wildly overproduced.  This ad checked both boxes.  

*the most egregious example of nostalgia bait was, of course, the awful "homage" to When Harry Met Sally.  I don't think I can even touch that one; it was SO cringey, SO obvious, and SO uncalled for I think I might just have to leave it alone.  Even I have my limits.