Holiday foolishness

I've been getting lots of email with special deals. I get a lot from the Phillies, who seem to alternate between 25% off and buy one thing, get 50% off a second thing. Even though those are substantially the same deal, it doesn't prevent them from also offering $25 off a $100 purchase. I can't decide...

The worst special deal I've gotten is from Dean and Deluca, a specialty food place in New York. The deal is, buy one gift, get 15% off a second gift of equal or lesser value. Wow, I'm blown away. But wait, there's more. They're offering 50% off shipping too. You just have to choose one or the other.

I don't understand this at all. Aside from its looking ridiculous compared to every other offer from every other company, I don't know who is going to care. Dean and Deluca is one of those places where you read the catalog and say, "Hey look, they have a tote bag full of candy for $75 and another tote filled with olive oil, vinegar, barbecue sauce, mustard and jam for $95. Isn't that silly?" I know people buy this stuff (and I guess I did once too since I'm on their mailing list) but who would be thinking, "Hmm, I'd really like to get that bag with the oil and mustard and the one with the candy, and if only the one with the candy was $65 instead of $75, or if only shipping was $8.75 instead of $17.50, gosh darn it, I'd buy it."

I'm not usually a fan of slick, made up names for things. But I do really like Cyber Monday. Not because I think it's such a great name- it's kind of meh, but the entire premise is that people are going to be on their computers shopping all day instead of doing their jobs. It used to be you had to sneak out of work to shop 'till you drop. Now you can sit at your desk and shop 'till you get up.

Even though I would normally just make up numbers to support this kind of argument, there's actually been some research. It's widely reported that 59% of companies are more concerned with the loss of productivity than with security breaches, and over 60% expect the loss of productivity will be greater than last year. On the other hand, over half of companies with network administrators will be blocking access to shopping sites this year, and of course we know that nobody is ever able to get around blocks like that. Unless, of course, they have a cell phone or an iPad or a laptop.

In the advertising business, when we were building production schedules for projects, we would pretty much chalk up December as useless because our suppliers were unproductive, and that was before computers. I can only imagine what happens now, when the people running the projects are too busy consuming to produce.

The symmetry of the whole thing is beautiful. The estimated Cyber Monday sales? About $1 billion. Loss of productivity? Also $1 billion.