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JacquelineDempsey posted:Yep, my point exactly. Gimme a ring like this instead: Good pick. Does anyone know of Mary Kay is a scummy sales thing? We had some girl come to our house selling it and quite a bit seemed shady, especially when she asked if I was over 18, I said I'd just turned 20 and she suggested I tried out this age-defying wrinkle cream.
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Mar 15, 2015 01:38
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Parasol Prophet posted:Completely unrelated to diamond talk: I don't know if it qualifies as scummy, but I love all the pseudo-food words companies have to use to meet regulations. The Colbert Report did a whole bit on "Wyngz" (for chicken-wing-type snacks that contain no actual wing meat), but my favorite is "Chocolatey". http://yle.fi/uutiset/food_giant_kesko_renames_meatless_meatballs_now_simply_balls/7858202 quote:Meatballs like your mom used to make typically use real cuts of meat. However the industrial variety aims for efficiency – that means that cast-away bits of pork and chicken are usually part of the mix.
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Mar 15, 2015 02:27
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Bismuth posted:Good pick. Mary Kay is an MLM just like Avon/Amway/Cutco/Scentsy/etc. The only difference is MK products are kinda poo poo and their target demographic is apparently people's elderly aunts. This site is addictive if you have any interest in exactly how shady MLMs are, it's run by a professional forensic accountant and has almost a decade worth of stories and math from former MK consultants and other MLM victims that basically prove -nobody- makes money in an MLM except the people at the very top of the pyramid. e: bbcode is apparently hard TheKennedys has a new favorite as of 02:39 on Mar 15, 2015 |
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Mar 15, 2015 02:36
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Why should we throw away perfectly good animal protein?
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Mar 15, 2015 02:39
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Bismuth posted:Good pick. Ha, I couldn't remember if you piped up in this thread but thought of you when posting that (I always enjoyed your doing god's work in the tumblr mock thread). Bismuth is so cool looking, I own two chunks. fits posted:http://yle.fi/uutiset/food_giant_kesko_renames_meatless_meatballs_now_simply_balls/7858202 That's drat interesting, re-defining "meat". Here in the US I know I've seen "mechanically separated [X]", but it's usually in the context of pet food or canned meats, neither of which I buy on the reg. Can we still call that "meat", here in 'murrica?
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Mar 15, 2015 02:46
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TheKennedys posted:Mary Kay is an MLM just like Avon/Amway/Cutco/Scentsy/etc. The only difference is MK products are kinda poo poo and their target demographic is apparently people's elderly aunts. This site is addictive if you have any interest in exactly how shady MLMs are, it's run by a professional forensic accountant and has almost a decade worth of stories and math from former MK consultants and other MLM victims that basically prove -nobody- makes money in an MLM except the people at the very top of the pyramid. Great, we must have an infestation in my area. I've seen Avon, Cutco, Scentsy, and MK stuff everywhere and people coming to our house selling it. Now I just feel bad for the sales people  JacquelineDempsey posted:Ha, I couldn't remember if you piped up in this thread but thought of you when posting that (I always enjoyed your doing god's work in the tumblr mock thread). Bismuth is so cool looking, I own two chunks. Bismuth is gorgeous and I would love to see more unconvential (and cheaper) wedding rings, mostly just to stick it to the diamond industry which is possibly the worlds biggest and scummiest industry/advertising situation. -- I also recall in elementary and middle school they would have these big assemblies that were basically these sales pitches trying to get kids to sell poo poo like wrapping paper or magazines and they would get AMAZING PRIZES if they sold x number of items/dollars. The promise was always that x% of the proceeds went to funding the school, but even as a little kid I didnt understand why if people wanted to fund the school they wouldnt just send a donation. It always felt incredibly scummy and I wondered why that was allowed or seen as ok to send little kids door to door trying to guilt and pressure family members and strangers alike like that.
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Mar 15, 2015 02:58
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Bismuth posted:I also recall in elementary and middle school they would have these big assemblies that were basically these sales pitches trying to get kids to sell poo poo like wrapping paper or magazines and they would get AMAZING PRIZES if they sold x number of items/dollars. The promise was always that x% of the proceeds went to funding the school, but even as a little kid I didnt understand why if people wanted to fund the school they wouldnt just send a donation. That is scummy. I can understand fundraising for a specific thing (eg, helping to send my high school's marching band to the Orange Bowl), but they seriously just sent y'all out to fund the school in general? Maybe I was spoiled going to a well-funded NY public school, but that seems ludicrous. I've heard the Girl Scouts aren't allowed to go door-to-door anymore. Around here, now they set up shop outside the 7-11's and Food Lion and the like, and harass you on the way in and out. I'd be curious to know if that's more or less effective, monetarily, than door-to-door.
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Mar 15, 2015 03:25
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JacquelineDempsey posted:That is scummy. I can understand fundraising for a specific thing (eg, helping to send my high school's marching band to the Orange Bowl), but they seriously just sent y'all out to fund the school in general? Maybe I was spoiled going to a well-funded NY public school, but that seems ludicrous. No just general fundraising. We'd all be marched into the gym for a mandatory assembly where the marketing people (not even the school staff) would pitch their poo poo directly to the children. I didnt realize it at the time but now I recognize it was designed to use peer pressure and parent guilt to get the kids to push their lovely merch whatever it might be (there were books, magazines, candy, and wrapping paper groups as I recall maybe more). They didnt specifically tell anyone HOW to sell the things, so maybe they didnt have any liability but it always ended up with little kids going door to door to ask strangers to sign up for or buy things. I know they still do it too because we get little kids at our door every year and whenever they come mom tells them that she is going to donate directly to the school (and does). I think I heard somewhere that these scummy things only give 10% or less of the proceeds to the school they're using for their free labor.
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Mar 15, 2015 04:01
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Bismuth posted:No just general fundraising. We'd all be marched into the gym for a mandatory assembly where the marketing people (not even the school staff) would pitch their poo poo directly to the children. I didnt realize it at the time but now I recognize it was designed to use peer pressure and parent guilt to get the kids to push their lovely merch whatever it might be (there were books, magazines, candy, and wrapping paper groups as I recall maybe more). They didnt specifically tell anyone HOW to sell the things, so maybe they didnt have any liability but it always ended up with little kids going door to door to ask strangers to sign up for or buy things. I know they still do it too because we get little kids at our door every year and whenever they come mom tells them that she is going to donate directly to the school (and does). I think I heard somewhere that these scummy things only give 10% or less of the proceeds to the school they're using for their free labor. Fortunately, I found out that you could avoid all of those events if you 'forgot' to turn in homework assignments. The best thing about being tossed into 'in school suspension' is that they let you sit and read.
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Mar 15, 2015 04:17
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Pick posted:Why should we throw away perfectly good animal protein? I'm in this boat too, meat is meat.
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Mar 15, 2015 04:33
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Humboldt Squid posted:I'm in this boat too, meat is meat. Yeah, I'm not sure what they're on about with their 'only meat cut off with a knife by a real human can be called meat' nonsense. Meat's muscle-tissue! I'll accept calling any and all muscle-tissue meat, even if that might turn out to mean I need to avoid certain kinds of inedible meat.
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Mar 15, 2015 04:41
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JacquelineDempsey posted:That is scummy. I can understand fundraising for a specific thing (eg, helping to send my high school's marching band to the Orange Bowl), but they seriously just sent y'all out to fund the school in general? Maybe I was spoiled going to a well-funded NY public school, but that seems ludicrous. In 7th grade, we were brought down to the gym for an assembly and heavily pressured by the school to sell a whole bunch of overpriced crap in a catalog. If you hit certain dollar levels, you got anything from little prizes to the limo ride (we were from the boondocks; perhaps one or two of us had even seen one in person) all the way up to a minute or what have you in the "Money Machine." The latter was a thing were minuscule amounts of money were blown around a little booth and you had to grab the bills. The Money Machine was brought to the demo and a couple of lucky saps got to step inside for a minute. I wish I could remember a company. My parents, both educators, helped me get what was considered the bare minimum amount that the school considered acceptable. I remember them buying a plastic cutting board and perhaps one of those way overpriced tiny boxes of chocolate that was stale by the time it was shipped. In 11th grade, the push was for magazine subscriptions. The pitch there was that if we did poorly, junior/senior prom would be held in our decrepit lunchroom, instead of its then-usual location of a nearby Air Force base (this was pre-9/11). I got myself a year of Yahoo Internet Life. I still have those and they are glorious in retrospect.
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Mar 15, 2015 05:07
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RC and Moon Pie posted:In 7th grade, we were brought down to the gym for an assembly and heavily pressured by the school to sell a whole bunch of overpriced crap in a catalog. If you hit certain dollar levels, you got anything from little prizes to the limo ride (we were from the boondocks; perhaps one or two of us had even seen one in person) all the way up to a minute or what have you in the "Money Machine." The latter was a thing were minuscule amounts of money were blown around a little booth and you had to grab the bills. The Money Machine was brought to the demo and a couple of lucky saps got to step inside for a minute. I wish I could remember a company. This is exactly the poo poo I'm talking about, we were also a poor/rural area. I cant think of anything scummier than trying to use kids (in our case as young as 4th or 5th graders) like this, I wish this poo poo was illegal.
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Mar 15, 2015 05:34
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I remember an ad I saw on Japanese TV a few years ago that was targeted at old ladies. The gist was that as you get older your hair thins out a bit, but luckily there's a solution: tiny wigs that you can sit on the top of your head and thus remain lush-haired and beautiful. I don't know why, but the worst part of the ad to me was a live-action demonstration of an old lady walking down some stairs at a subway station, while further up the stairs people behind her were all peering directly down at her balding spot. It absolutely infuriated me that women in their 80s were still having their physical insecurities exploited so that someone could make a quick buck (well, quick yen).
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Mar 15, 2015 05:43
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JacquelineDempsey posted:(Seriously, diamonds are boring. Opal, black pearls, a bismuth crystal... at least they're pretty to look at. I still don't understand the allure.) Am I being obliviously goony for wanting bismuth rings for my wedding now? I never knew about them before, but goddamn are those a million times cooler than a normal gemstone. And I'm seeing them on Etsy for <$100. You could probably get ones custom-made for less than a plain gold band at a brick and mortar store. Parasol Prophet posted:As a newly engaged person, I'm not looking forward to dealing with the whole engagement/wedding industry. Where you can find a white/pale colored formal dress for $100 in a regular store, but if you go to a bridal store you're looking at $1000+ for what might as well be a white prom dress you're only going to wear for one day. (Seriously, the satin, tulle, rhinestones... they all look like tacky prom dresses.) Just calling it a wedding dress means you can tack on an extra 0 and get away with it. And it goes further than that-- you can mark up pretty much anything by making it white and silver and saying it's for your ~special day~. gently caress wedding dresses so hard. I basically have to ignore all the price talk when my fiancee watches say yes to the dress. People getting asked what their price range is, and them saying they're willing to pay as much as a nice 5-year-old car costs. Thankfully, my mother-in-law has a degree in clothing design/sewing/whatever it's called, and I'm pretty sure she's been waiting for this chance since she first had a baby girl. My tux is probably going to be more expensive than her dress, but at least I get to wear it more than once. Tunicate posted:Fortunately, I found out that you could avoid all of those events if you 'forgot' to turn in homework assignments. Yeah, being able to read after finishing my work was what made the in-school suspension days not significantly worse than any other day. Get the work done in less than an hour, spend the next three hours reading.
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Mar 15, 2015 07:26
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JacquelineDempsey posted:That is scummy. I can understand fundraising for a specific thing (eg, helping to send my high school's marching band to the Orange Bowl), but they seriously just sent y'all out to fund the school in general? Maybe I was spoiled going to a well-funded NY public school, but that seems ludicrous. Holy poo poo I just remembered these god drat things. I was always too lazy to actually participate in these things but they were MLM in nature. The school district I was in participated in this poo poo from like 2nd to 8th grade. The product was always pretty stupid, it was either magazines, some baked goods, candy, or something else that really didn't make any sense. They were fundraisers but I don't really remember where the actual money went. I sat through at least one of these a year, they weren't completely evil in nature but pretty sketch.
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Mar 15, 2015 08:33
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It worked on me. I figured, "There's no way anyone else is going to buy this poo poo, so I'll just whine at my parents until they buy me candy and get a prize for it!"
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Mar 15, 2015 08:39
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Bismuth posted:I also recall in elementary and middle school they would have these big assemblies that were basically these sales pitches trying to get kids to sell poo poo like wrapping paper or magazines and they would get AMAZING PRIZES if they sold x number of items/dollars. The promise was always that x% of the proceeds went to funding the school, but even as a little kid I didnt understand why if people wanted to fund the school they wouldnt just send a donation. Holy repressed memory, Batman! I totally forgot about these assemblies. I also remember seeing ads in... I think Archie comics? Maybe Disney Adventures. Yes I used to read Disney Adventures, gently caress off. In any case, these things said you sell poo poo door to door, and then win FABULOUS CASH & PRIZES! Then it would show you a bunch of pictures of stuff you could win, like a SEGA Genesis or a rad scooter with neon green wheels. I showed my dad one of these "opportunities" one day, and he sat me down and explained to me how scams work. I was like 6 years old. Bismuth posted:I wish this poo poo was illegal. Pick, Humboldt Squid, aerion111 posted:meat is meat On that note, one advertising technique I hate is for loving dog food. "CONTAINS REAL CARROTS AND CELERY AND BEETS AND ALL THE THINGS YOUR DOG LOVES!!! YOUR DOG WILL BE ALL LIKE  TO EAT HIS VEGETABLES!!!!!!!!!!!"If I may quote from Wikipedia: quote:The domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris) is a usually furry, carnivorous[2][3][4] canid carnivoran mammal. Why the poo poo would I pay twice as much for dog food because it has vegetables in it? If you're that concerned with giving your buddy some, throw a few carrots down when you're chopping them up for dinner for Christ's sake. The Mighty Moltres has a new favorite as of 10:59 on Mar 15, 2015 |
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Mar 15, 2015 10:29
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RC and Moon Pie posted:In 7th grade, we were brought down to the gym for an assembly and heavily pressured by the school to sell a whole bunch of overpriced crap in a catalog. If you hit certain dollar levels, you got anything from little prizes to the limo ride (we were from the boondocks; perhaps one or two of us had even seen one in person) all the way up to a minute or what have you in the "Money Machine." The latter was a thing were minuscule amounts of money were blown around a little booth and you had to grab the bills. The Money Machine was brought to the demo and a couple of lucky saps got to step inside for a minute. I wish I could remember a company. I remember being let off kind of easy from that crap. My parents were both HS teachers, and I dunno if it's like some kinda 'pact' between teachers or something, but there'd always be a bunch of these things in the teachers' lounges and the faculty would kinda 'help each other out' placing an occasional order because they all knew how the game was played. The only thing that wasn't so bad was when my track team would have to sell those 40-packs of candy bars for a buck a pop. Those were generally painless (at least until you were down to a few Krackle bars). A few years back, I bought an overpriced tub of cookie dough when they were fundraising at a local middle school. I never got that tub of snickerdoodles...  And, just about anything with women's skincare/beauty care is lovely. Really playing on 'without your youthfulness, you ain't poo poo' or 'Is that a wrinkle? Pack it up pack it in, MA'AM!'. For a while, Biore had this line of products harping on 'are you too old for acne, but too young for wrinkles?!' as a way of shilling their stuff. Along with the usual hubbub of all kinds of extracts and acids and oils that they try to dazzle you with, that are *sure* to get you a complexion as smooth as a baby's rear end.
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Mar 15, 2015 12:44
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The Endbringer posted:Why the poo poo would I pay twice as much for dog food because it has vegetables in it? If you're that concerned with giving your buddy some, throw a few carrots down when you're chopping them up for dinner for Christ's sake. People are insane about dog food. You can buy special chocolate and beer for dogs. Because people apparently think that their dog must want the same things they do, but obviously you can't actually feed your dog chocolate or beer, so instead you buy these fake versions for them. You know what food your dog likes? Pretty much anything, especially if it's a bit of whatever you're eating. They don't know what chocolate or beer are, and they're not going to think they're eating or drinking the same thing you are when they're clearly not.
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Mar 15, 2015 13:49
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All the goons who had these assemblies and fundraising schticks in school: Was there some kind of penalty if you didn't sell anything? Like if you said "gently caress this, I don't care about prizes, I'm not going door to door selling crap" --- were there consequences for that? Just curious. What burns me is that most of you seem to be saying this happened in poor/rural areas. So, the people in this town have no money; let's sell them crap they don't need, so their kids can get an education and better themselves! Ugh, that's atrocious. Like I said, guess I was lucky growing up in a middle class suburb in the 80's. We never had any sort of school-wide fundraising, only if some club or athletic team was trying to achieve a goal. (The NY State lottery helps to fund schools, so maybe that played a part, too?) The only thing I remember buying: my high school would regularly have "flower days", proceeds usually going to something like the yearbook group, or the drama club, etc. You signed up, paid $2, named your recipient, and then on flower day they delivered a carnation to them in homeroom with a personalized note. Usually, these were bought by established couples or girls sending them to their bff's; if you were feeling bold, it was a cute way of stating that you had a crush on that guy/girl in your geometry class without having to say it. 
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Mar 15, 2015 14:28
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Am I being obliviously goony for wanting bismuth rings for my wedding now? I never knew about them before, but goddamn are those a million times cooler than a normal gemstone. And I'm seeing them on Etsy for <$100. You could probably get ones custom-made for less than a plain gold band at a brick and mortar store. For what it's worth, I used to have a piece of bismuth hanging on a necklace and one day the piece just snapped right in half. So it may not be a great option for an everyday ring.
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Mar 15, 2015 15:04
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JacquelineDempsey posted:All the goons who had these assemblies and fundraising schticks in school: It was really a peer pressure thing. They made it a big deal to do well and they'd publicize who did well and what not. I remember buying it hook, line, and sinker and winning this stupid rear end disco ball thing. Ugh it was so dumb.
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Mar 15, 2015 15:36
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JacquelineDempsey posted:All the goons who had these assemblies and fundraising schticks in school: Not that I experienced. You could opt out of selling poo poo and receive no negative repercussions. JacquelineDempsey posted:What burns me is that most of you seem to be saying this happened in poor/rural areas. So, the people in this town have no money; let's sell them crap they don't need, so their kids can get an education and better themselves! Ugh, that's atrocious. Like you, I was middle-class, and this poo poo still happened. It seemed to just be a common tactic for companies to try to recruit children into their sales force.
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Mar 15, 2015 15:55
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Holy crap. I totally forgot about the slave labor that was forced upon me. It was a poor christian/private school in a poor area, and most of the parents struggled to pay for the kids tuition. I was told to sell stuff way before I was at the age to even understand what was going on. I remember being like 8 and looking through those catalogs. Occasionally they would "check up on you" to see how much you sold and give you a guilt trip if weren't keeping up on it. I lived in an area where going door-to-door wasn't really safe and my parents didn't have time to escort me around, so I ended up getting "talked to" a lot about my low sales numbers. They had a big poster set up in the auditorium that tracked all the kid's numbers to shame us. Eventually my mom ended up getting family members to buy some of the garbage to get me in the acceptable sales zone before the last few days of the program. I think my prize was one of those handheld battery-powered fans with a water sprayer.
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Mar 15, 2015 15:56
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Have we done the radio commercials where they repeat the phone number 10 times at the end? It's always for the worst products too, like hairloss treatments
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Mar 15, 2015 16:11
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My highschool did club fundraisers pretty well. Basically every day of the week there was subs or chicken sandwiches or pizza available during lunch. In a club that needs money? Sign up to serve the food that day, your club gets the profits and you get a free sub or a couple slices of pizza. I think drama club got every Monday or something.
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Mar 15, 2015 16:17
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If you want to read a decent book about marketing and children that'll make you super angry about our terrible culture and maybe decide that having kids would be real hosed up, Born to buy is pretty legit.artsy fartsy posted:For what it's worth, I used to have a piece of bismuth hanging on a necklace and one day the piece just snapped right in half. So it may not be a great option for an everyday ring. Yeah, when I got married we talked a lot about non-diamond options - overpriced, conflict minerals, etc - but at the end of the day diamonds are just real fuckin' durable and you're (in theory) gonna wear the thing for decades so we ended up getting one anyway. Choco1980 posted:When I lived in the Norcal region, one of my ex-wife's nephews got roped into trying to be a Kirby vacuum salesman, which is just as much a scheme as Vector. Only their Vacuums look like they haven't been updated in technology since 1950, which explains why nobody buys them. The vacuums also cost like two grand. I had a couple of them show up to my house one day, and I figured I'd be polite and humor them (and see if they could get the cat piss out of my office carpet), but holy poo poo they were there for like three hours and at the end I had to basically yell at them to get them to leave with their stupid vacuum.
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Mar 15, 2015 16:22
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Baldbeard posted:I was told to sell stuff way before I was at the age to even understand what was going on. Abominable. Guilt-tripping elementary students because the state wouldn't finance the schools... Absolutely horrible. I'm genuinely so sorry that any of you had to deal with that, just to get a basic education.
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Mar 15, 2015 16:24
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Parasol Prophet posted:As a newly engaged person, I'm not looking forward to dealing with the whole engagement/wedding industry. Where you can find a white/pale colored formal dress for $100 in a regular store, but if you go to a bridal store you're looking at $1000+ for what might as well be a white prom dress you're only going to wear for one day. (Seriously, the satin, tulle, rhinestones... they all look like tacky prom dresses.) Just calling it a wedding dress means you can tack on an extra 0 and get away with it. And it goes further than that-- you can mark up pretty much anything by making it white and silver and saying it's for your ~special day~. I know people that have spent like $80,000 on their weddings. I'm serious. Enough money to buy multiple brand loving new cars and they blew it all on one day often going into debt to do so. This absolutely mystifies me. I could understand that if you were rich and could just go "meh, whatever" but spending two year's worth of an average salary before taxes on a wedding is just outright confusing. The whole wedding industry is scummy as hell. It's all about "SPEND MORE SPEND MORE SPEND MORE IT'S THE MOST IMPORTANT DAY OF YOUR LIFE MAKE IT SUPER DUPER EXTRA SPECIAL!!!!! BY THE WAY HERE ARE SOME OVERPRICED WHITE THINGS FOR YOU TO BUY AREN'T THEY NICE? YEAH!" The stupidest thing is that the most stable, long-lasting, happy marriages I've seen have been the ones where the couple went "meh, bump that noise" and had a simpler thing. When my aunt got married it was on the farm she had with the guy and they wore freaking blue jeans. They got married by a friend who was a preacher at the time and spent like $200 total on it. Then they had a big potluck dinner afterwards. They're probably the happiest couple I have ever seen. On the other side of it expensive weddings tend to lead to marriages with a high failure rate especially if debt gets involved. Why yes, that's a fantastic way to start a marriage, arguing over who should make payments on the wedding. I think the dumbest phrase that comes out of the wedding industry is that "this is the most important day of your life." OK so you get married then it's all downhill from there? Or do you mean that women are entirely defined by their ability to convince somebody to marry them? Yeah it's a day to celebrate but THE most important day OF YOUR ENTIRE LIFE? Please.
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Mar 15, 2015 16:26
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Pharnakes posted:Prisoner labour is one of those ideas which seem excellent on first glance, but when actually implemented complete with corruption, miscarriages of justice, for profit prisons, ect are just too rife with conflicts of interests to ever be run properly. The men assigned to field crews are woken at five o’clock in the morning. When all of the crews are assembled, the men walk (sometimes miles) to the fields and start picking cotton on the 18,000 acre plantation. The men are paid little, working mainly for their room and board. If they fail to pick enough cotton by the end of the day, they will be forced to work the fields all weekend. Everything is picked by hand, from the cotton and soybeans to the row crops of okra and tomatoes. The men work until the armed guards let them break for water, then they continue under the hot sun. Hundreds of primarily African-American men are forced to work the crops with minimal rest and meal breaks. Armed men on horseback ensure their compliance. http://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2085&context=sulr JacquelineDempsey posted:All the goons who had these assemblies and fundraising schticks in school: ToxicSlurpee posted:The stupidest thing is that the most stable, long-lasting, happy marriages I've seen have been the ones where the couple went "meh, bump that noise" and had a simpler thing. When my aunt got married it was on the farm she had with the guy and they wore freaking blue jeans. They got married by a friend who was a preacher at the time and spent like $200 total on it. Then they had a big potluck dinner afterwards. GWBBQ has a new favorite as of 16:39 on Mar 15, 2015 |
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Mar 15, 2015 16:30
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Was Morley Candy Makers running a scam, or were they just trying to get their product out there (haha, yeah right)? I distinctly remember the catalog that had impossible to get items in it (A new BMX bike! A 19 inch color television! A home computer! A Nintendo Entertainment System!), and I remember selling such candy when I was in elementary school almost thirty years ago. I only ever did it once and only sold to my family because going door to door was stupid and I was wise beyond my years, realizing it was all bullshit to begin with. I likened that child/slave labor poo poo to the skee-ball machines at Chuck E. Cheese with the same impossible to get prizes up on the shelves, and even though you had a wheelbarrow full of tickets from the machine thinking you had enough to get that boss electric guitar with amp on the high shelf, you'd wind up with some crummy pencil eraser or a little green plastic army man or some stupid rear end bullshit.
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Mar 15, 2015 16:37
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You Are A Elf posted:I likened that child/slave labor poo poo to the skee-ball machines at Chuck E. Cheese with the same impossible to get prizes up on the shelves, and even though you had a wheelbarrow full of tickets from the machine thinking you had enough to get that boss electric guitar with amp on the high shelf, you'd wind up with some crummy pencil eraser or a little green plastic army man or some stupid rear end bullshit.  I was a third of the way to an Xbox.
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Mar 15, 2015 16:47
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Not sure if this has been mentioned yet but: non-stick frying pans, the ones sold on daytime TV. Of course the cheese doesn't stick when you put it in the pan with the gas on full you asshat, it's nasty oily cheese and is therefore self lubricating as long as the drat pan is hot.
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Mar 15, 2015 17:22
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GWBBQ posted:
 Sorry to keep harping on it, but I can't get over this poo poo. For reference, is this a more recent thing? I'm old, graduated high school in 1991 (I have no idea what Weepuls are). We didn't have any of this peer pressure to sell Amway and cheap candy crap when I was growing up. Is this common practice now, training our kids to be salesmen for products that wouldn't make it on Shark Tank?
JacquelineDempsey has a new favorite as of 17:57 on Mar 15, 2015 |
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Mar 15, 2015 17:55
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JacquelineDempsey posted:
I graduated high school in 99 and we had it, but only sparingly. Every other year or so in middle school, once in high school (beyond the fundraising for marching band or drama club, etc). My husband graduated in 88, and they didn't have anything like that when he was in school short of the specific club fundraising. It seems like it really got started in the mid-90s and ramped up from there. A coworker of mine has kids selling this poo poo like once a month.
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Mar 15, 2015 18:25
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My school had stuff for you to sell, and if you didn't sell it all the remainder would be added to your school fees. They even had a buyout option for like 100 bucks for parents who didn't want to deal with the poo poo.
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Mar 15, 2015 19:37
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bobjr posted:My school had stuff for you to sell, and if you didn't sell it all the remainder would be added to your school fees. They even had a buyout option for like 100 bucks for parents who didn't want to deal with the poo poo. How the gently caress was that not illegal?
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Mar 15, 2015 19:38
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ToxicSlurpee posted:I know people that have spent like $80,000 on their weddings. I'm serious. Enough money to buy multiple brand loving new cars and they blew it all on one day often going into debt to do so. This absolutely mystifies me. I could understand that if you were rich and could just go "meh, whatever" but spending two year's worth of an average salary before taxes on a wedding is just outright confusing. The whole wedding industry is scummy as hell. It's all about "SPEND MORE SPEND MORE SPEND MORE IT'S THE MOST IMPORTANT DAY OF YOUR LIFE MAKE IT SUPER DUPER EXTRA SPECIAL!!!!! BY THE WAY HERE ARE SOME OVERPRICED WHITE THINGS FOR YOU TO BUY AREN'T THEY NICE? YEAH!" It's all completely ridiculous-- the spending, the false high stakes, but the industry's actual emotional manipulation (If you don't spend $2700 on a ring, HOW WILL SHE KNOW YOU LOVE HER?/If he doesn't spend $2700 on a ring, HOW DO YOU KNOW HE LOVES YOU?) takes the five-tier bespoke cake with handsculpted fondant flowers. I can easily see people getting sucked into the mindset that this has to be a special day where everything is perfect, because ideally in today's society you're still not supposed to ever have more than one wedding, are you? (Or, even if you DO know the statistics, just admitting the possibility is admitting that your relationship is imperfect enough to someday fail.) You get just one chance at perfection, so spare no expense to make sure that happens! There are so many things that we get told are 'the most important day/years/time of your life', though. High school, prom (lol), college, engagement, weddings. You have to live it up NOW and do everything you want to while you still can, because otherwise you're setting yourself up for a lifetime of regret! And yeah, those are usually important times that form a lot of memories that you'll look back on later in life, but putting so much pressure on people to make sure those memories are the best because that's the only time you'll ever be happy again or something is really gross.
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Mar 15, 2015 19:53
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GWBBQ posted:If you want to see it in a less morally ambiguous light, look no further than mostly-black prison populations in the south who are used as slave labor on cotton plantations. Yes, this is happening now in 2015. Does this poo poo exist to this level outside the South? Content: I feel like every commercial for every drug ever is scummy. No we're not all upper middle class attractive people. No we don't all "retreat" to our nice 4br 3.5 bath house to contemplate how sad and depressed we are while being surrounded by a happy family and plenty of private time. No we don't run out to the beach every time we take our pill and feel super happy. Its just such a fantasy that is used to push drugs that most people are in no way qualified to assess the risks of or benefit of over another. Edit: Wedding chat. Someone on facebook humble-bragged how they spent $90K on their wedding. I said "let them eat cake", thats a lot of frickin money! They ended up blocking me and anyone else that agreed that it was a lot of money, all because I and others noted that this was more than half the price of their HOUSE. Its seriously beyond reason with the wedding spending. Jastiger has a new favorite as of 19:57 on Mar 15, 2015 |
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Mar 15, 2015 19:54
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