First and most important, how are we all feeling about the divorce of Tom Cruise and my best friend Katie Holmes? I'm so glad that this was not oddly foreshadowed by my novel, Hollywood Car Wash, which is about a made-up relationship that is just for publicity and is not at all a roman a clef about them. Nope. You'll also notice that they've made this announcement on a Friday to give it the weekend to die down a little, and that it came AFTER his movie "Rock of Ages" came out, for which she did few to no effusive red-carpet appearances.
So, hi! It's Friday again, and I have two blog posts again. On my other blog, I have challenged a well-known author to a self-publishing cage match, so we'll see how that goes. Should be good for a laugh.
On the "Funny Strange" tip, I'm wondering– do you buy dog food at Petco? I noticed recently they changed their rewards system, and the new one is laughably complicated. It used to simply consist of the following offer: you buy ten bags of dog food, you get one free. This was fine with me, as I really only buy dog food at Petco and don't spend alot of time or mental energy there. I just noticed that they re-launched, though, and now their rewards program has some kind of algorithm, the info graphic of which looks like this:
Wow. This is like a complicated piece of math, whereby a small dog bowl plus a tennis ball plus some scissors equals some kind of acrrual of an unknown amount of reward points that I am unsure how to redeem, making me go "What the whaaaaat? Are you going to discount my dog food or not, Petco?"
I'm sorry– I do marketing and search engine optimization as part of my job and I would rather not think algorithmically when it comes to dog food. I fail to understand how marketing departments think stuff like this is a good idea. Here's another example: in New York, the D'Agostino grocery stores also have something like this where you earn a certain amount of points per purchase and and you can apply those points to certain other purchases when you check out, and the checkers will say things that they don't realize sound completely absurd, like "Do you want to use your 11 points on those bananas?" and you're like "I'm just hungry, I don't want to do math. Why don't you apply it wherever it makes sense?"
My point here is that I think it's funny when companies want their customers to put brain power into their made-up rewards programs and they actually think that this is going to prompt increased engagement, when what programs like this actually do is make me stop using them altogether. I predict that a year from now they will go back to giving me the 11th bag of dog food for free, because they will hear feedback about how confusing this new system is.
Or maybe they're trying to get me to not engage their rewards program, which would also be interesting. All this "dog food algebra" experiment has accomplished so far is to make me check the other pet store down the street to see if I can get the same dog food for a better price. Awesome job, Petco marketing department!