“Gentlemen, I’ll be honest: I don’t know how to sell your product,” Draper whispered as he leaned forward, elbows on the table, fingers massaging his temples.
A pregnant pause, as the client gathered his panicked thoughts, one by one.
“But…but you’re Don Draper, the bossest ad man who ever pomaded his hair! Surely you must have something! We can’t even give our lip gloss away in this market”
With a sly grin forming, Draper shoves his chair back from the table and stands up in the same motion. “Well…I may have something…” he says, his words trailing off as he begins pacing and gesticulating with his lit Lucky Strike.
Sighs of relief, all around the room.
“Sometimes, in the ad game, you have to fib a little,” Draper began, as knowing glances were shared around the room. “If you want a girl to think a doll is cute, you put “Lil” in front of the name. If you want a guy to start a bank account, you call it an “Executive” bank account.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” the dumbfounded client said with suspicious eyes, feeling as if he was about to get taken.
Don looked at the client as he would look at a child with an intellectual disability.
“If you want people to think you’re trendy, you have to use a dot-com. In this case, you’ll be twice as trendy if you call it Trendy.com.”
“But we don’t even own that domain!” the client sputtered. “We don’t even know what a domain is! It’s 1960!”
Account executive Pete Campbell shifted in his seat, knowing Draper was about to go in for the kill.
“That’s the beauty of it,” Draper said. “Nobody knows what it means. They’ll just know it’s trendy. And they’ll buy your lip gloss.”
As the truth of Draper’s words set in, Campbell led the room in a round of applause. The client was too enamored with the idea to feel his wallet getting lighter, but it was happening. Brother, was it ever happening…
Let’s face it: Houseguests can be a gigantic pain in the ass. With a quick trip to the dollar store, they can be a gigantic pain in the ass with fresh breath. Go to the dollar store and stock up on toothbrushes (these were two for a dollar, and they even light up!) to keep around for overnight guests to use if they forget theirs.
If you want extra credit, pick up a tube of dollar store toothpaste (“Made from real teeth!”) to keep around as well. I may have read somewhere that even the poisoned toothpaste is okay to use once or twice. Your minty-breathed friends will thank you.
I only bought this one because it scared the crap out of me. Some wiseacre had hidden it in a pile of posters, and for a moment, I thought it was real.
Then I got to thinking how sad it is that I think so little of the dollar store that I believe there actually might be enormous devil-rats crawing through the merch.
If you want to make sure your little boy grows up into a real man, you can’t start getting him hooked on chew too early. And since it would absolutely ridiculous to give him real chewing tobacco until he’s at least eight years old, you can start him off with this: NASCAR-brand Champion Chew chewing gum. It’s like training wheels for his journey into redneck manhood.
Delivered in a cylindrical container that will give him the telltale ‘redneck ring’ in the back pocket of his jeans, these crunchy little dextrose/sugar nightmares will tear up your kid’s mouth like sandpaper-covered razors. You know it’s good when it’s endorsed by 63rd-ranked NASCAR “champion” Mike Wallace. Don’t miss out.
I have a bottle of 2005 Chateau Lafite Rothschild (Pauillac) wine. In two years, it will be worth more money and taste much better than if I drank it today.
I have a bottle of 2006 Alaskan Smoked Porter beer. In two years, it will be worth slightly more money and taste much better than if I drank it today.
I have a can of 2007 Tempe Music Festival energy drink. In two years, it will be worth absolutely nothing and it might kill me if I drank it.
With the economy in the crapper, Dollar Stores are getting mucho amor across the blogosphere. In this post, Dana from NotMadeOfMoney.com lists eight things she thinks are great bargains. While she didn’t mention the preg-o-meter, she did list OTC medications, which is something I can’t say I’m fully behind.
Call me crazy, but I just prefer to buy my medications, my dirty statues, and my Jesus-lotion at different stores.
Among her ideas that I’m all about:
- Umbrellas – I believe I’ve already mentioned the awesomeness of dollar store umbrellas.
- Generic version of Drano – They save money by not including a safety top, and using the same type of bottle as your kid’s favorite juice! Just kidding.
- Shaving cream – If I wasn’t an electric razor man, I’d be all over this.
- Hair brushes – I got a combination hair brush/mirror/pen at a “3 Peso” store in Mexico. I crap you not. I’ll post on it later.
- Sunglasses – I lose these as often as I wear them. I’d buy them in bulk if I could.
This one leaves me scratching my head. Let me get this straight: If you can’t afford to wrap something in nice paper, so you use something free: Newspaper. But now you can buy something for actual money that is supposed to look exactly like free newspaper. Which is what we have here: A substitute for something free that you actually have to pay for.
I know that being frugal is becoming popular again, but going out of your way to spend money to look broke is borderline insanity.
Your Eggo is Preggo
We at Crap for a Buck are huge fans of the WalletPop blog, and yesterday, Zac Bissonnett (whose last name joins ballooneer, Mississippi and bookkeeper as the only words I can think of that have three sets of double letters) wrote an article about dollar store pregnancy tests.
He and his commentors make several good points (“if you can’t afford an $8 pregnancy test, you shouldn’t be trying to have a child anyway;” “the folks who buy a pregnancy test at the Dollar Tree are the same ones who bought their condoms there;” etc.).
However, who buys one disposable pregnancy test, gets a +, and then starts planning the baby shower? Don’t women generally see a positive, freak out, buy another test (and then another, and another, a la Juno) or go to the doctor to confirm the results?
And if you’re worried about a false-negative, just think of it this way: You get to enjoy another month of blissful ignorance before you run out and buy a pregnancy test from a store that doesn’t also sell raw MSG.
So maybe your dollar store pregnancy test wouldn’t be the last one you take before having that difficult “so-what-are-we-going-to-do-about-the-situation” talk, but as far as first steps go, you could do worse.
And that, dear readers, is me defending the dollar store. I need to go take a shower now.
I never want to have a daughter. Not in a world like this.
This is what passes for fashionable these days? When did it become okay for four-year-old girls to don sexessories that are nothing short of training wheels for a career in floozitry? Fake gold and zebra stripes/leopard spots? You might as well tattoo “prosti-tot” on her forehead, set her up with a pre-paid cell phone and introduce her to a stone-cold hustla named Zimo. This gear is so tacky, it makes Claire’s Accessories look like Cartier.
Call me paranoid, but nope…No daughters for me.
Filed under: News
Two things happened today: 1) I was reading a post from J. Money at Budgets Are Sexy, and 2) a friend either had his wallet stolen (if you believe him), or left it at the liquor store checkout (if you know him).
The combination of these reminded me of the importance of photocopying the contents of one’s wallet, and updating those copies at LEAST yearly.
Having a copy of everything in your wallet will ensure that if it’s lost or stolen, you’ll know which cards need immediate cancelling (credit/debit cards mainly), and which need to be replaced eventually (AAA card, Blockbuster library card, insurance cards, rent-ten-dirty-movies-get-the-eleventh-free punch card, etc.).
Plus, after your wallet goes missing, time is of the essence. While you’re looking up the card cancellation number on visa.com, the guy who nicked your billfold is busy spending your hard-earned ducats. Luckily, since customer service phone numbers are usually printed on the back of credit/debit cards, you’ll have all of them in one place.
Lastly, don’t forget to lock up your photocopies. They’re as good as gold to identity thieves, and were an identity thief to get his hands on them, the stench of irony would be overwhelming.
