At some point, Someone In Marketing thought that this design change would be a good idea for Roger Depuis watches:
I leave it to your imagination as to the average cost of a Depuis watch… now double it, and you’ll be closer.
I’m always reminded of the immortal words of another Roger, Roger Moore: “The point of language is to communicate your thoughts in the shortest possible time and in the clearest possible way.”
Now translate that into telling the time, and apply to wristwatches.
I read this story about the redoubtable Martha Stewart with some interest:
Homemaking mogul Martha Stewart recently revealed that she’s been using the same exact container of liquid eyeliner for 15 to 20 years – and some experts are sounding the alarm over the practice.
In a new makeup tutorial, which she demonstrated for Allure, the 83-year-old admitted that she rotates through five tubes of the discontinued T. LeClerc liquid eyeliners.
In order to keep them looking good, Stewart shared that she just adds water to them, and they haven’t dried out – yet.
Let’s just ignore the usual panic-mongering of “experts” because fuck ’em: Our Martha doesn’t seem to be suffering any harm, and she’s 83 years old, so she can do whatever the hell she wants.
I am more interested in the fact that T. LeClerc (whoever they are) discontinued the lady’s favorite makeup, despite her ringing endorsement thereof. And if the star power of Martha Stewart can’t stop a beloved brand from disappearing of the shelves, what chance do we mere mortals have when it comes to our favorite products disappearing into the ether? Why, none at all.
Here’s my own tale of woe.
I have been using the same brand of deodorant ever since I was old enough to start needing it, i.e. early adolescence (70 minus 13 equals 57 years of continuous, unbroken use). This is it:
…taken from my purchase history at Amazon in 2021, when I last purchased a case of the stuff — because it had completely disappeared from all supermarket- and drugstore shelves. I suspected it was going to be problematic to reorder it, hence my large purchase.
And of course, my gloomy prediction has indeed come to pass, because when I searched for it recently, I got this foul note:
Well, it won’t. I’ve searched high and low, and it’s gone.
Some brief history of the brand is in order, before I continue.
Old Spice is one of those flagship brands, once manufactured by Shulton, and subsequently purchased by the loathsome Procter & Gamble company (may their little Cincinnati nostrils rot). Old Spice is a remnant of the “heritage” brands; almost uniquely among male toiletries, the research showed that it was the brand most likely to be purchased by young men adopting their father’s favorite. Indeed, the Old Spice Classic deodorant and aftershave (the latter in that distinctive little white bottle with the gray press-in top) can still be found in stores, and it was my Dad’s aftershave, the only one I can remember him using — hence when it came time to buy deodorant and aftershave, it was the brand I first sampled.
Unfortunately, the Classic didn’t work for me — it was too pungent, and it didn’t smell the same on me as it did on my Dad (#DifferentPhysiology). Even my Mom noticed the difference. So I did the next thing: I tried a variant — at the time the only variant — of Old Spice, and discovered the “Fresh” label.
It fit me like a glove: smelled great, worked well (even with the dreaded Teenage Hormones) and — if I may be indiscreet for a moment — it played no small part in my youthful seductions. I smelled good, always, and still do.
That may not last, however, because with the Classic Fresh having disappeared, I now have to try to find its replacement. And to date, I can’t.
I must have tried every Old Spice variant — and there are now fucking dozens of them — on the market.
Fucking hell, what a shit show.
I’ve tried them all, but none smell good, in fact the reverse. And for those Alert Readers who spotted the “Fresh” variant at the end of the second pic, it may actually be the worst of the lot: oily, pungent and just foul. They changed the formulation.
In its own small way, this is just a replica of the Coke / New Coke / Classic Coke marketing fuckup of the 1980s, except that P&G (may their armpits rot) are never going to reissue the Fresh variant in its original formula because #P&GAreAssholes.
And I’ve also tried some Brands Not Old Spice, with horrifying results. Yeccchhh. And this experimentation is expensive because of Bidenflation, where instead of just paying a few bucks for a stick of deodorant, nowadays one has to get a credit check first.
I know that in the grand scheme of things, the travails of some Elderly White Guy trying to find a decent replacement deodorant are indeed small potatoes. But it still gets up my nose — literally, in many cases — that after over five decades of loyal use, some cunt in Marketing (aided and abetted by some cunt in Finance) has decided that my beloved product is no longer viable, and has tossed it into the trashcan of history, and me along with it.
I need to get to the range.
I love capitalism. Why? No sooner had the ink dried on the fraudulent-but-ultimately pointless counterfeit ballots in Pennsylvania. Michigan etc. when (courtesy of Reader Mike L.) I learned that the Smart Marketing Guys have got going:
US cruise company offering four-year escape during Trump presidency
A Florida-based cruise company is offering disgruntled US voters the chance to escape by traveling the world during Donald Trump’s upcoming four years in office.
Villa Vie Residences has capitalized on the election results by offering Americans a four-year escape – the length of a presidential term – starting at around $160,000 per person, taking guests to more than 425 ports in 140 countries. [more details at the link]
My only requirement is that the trip is non-refundable after the ship has left port — in other words, if the travelers are suddenly overcome with buyer’s regret or whatever, they don’t get any money back, and they have to make their own way home from whatever country they happen to be in. And if the poor regretful souls, having spent all their savings on this 4-year escape, are unable to afford the cost of a flight back to the U.S., I’m sure the newly-revitalized U.S. Air Force would be only too willing to set up refugee flights and help them get out of wherever they are…
…if you see what I mean.
In his latest video, Harry Metcalfe takes aim at supercars — or to be more specific, their manufacturers — and their ballooning love affair with technology.
Now Harry lives in a different world from pretty much 99.99% of the rest of the world, because the market for the insanely-priced supercars is absolutely minuscule; and his point is that the market is shrinking still more.
I don’t care about any of that, and I’d bet good money that pretty much none of my Readers could give a rat’s ass about it either, for all sorts of reasons:
I’m not even going to talk about how fugly all these new super/hypercars look, because that’s also a frequent target for my rants on these pages.
Lest you couldn’t be bothered to spend half an hour in Harry’s company, let me illustrate his point about car depreciation by looking at a car we all know about: the Bentley Continental GT convertible (GTC, for the cognoscenti ). Here is the 2024 model, with its 4.0L V8:
I have to say, by the way, that it looks absolutely gorgeous: very definitely a worthy successor to the 1930s “Blower” “Speed Six” Bentley which won Le Mans several times. It’s price, however, does not look absolutely gorgeous: $340,000 with only a few adornments.
Which is bad enough. Now let’s look at its second-hand value. Here’s a 2015 GTC:
Looks more like a limo than the 2024 model, but essentially it’s the same car (same engine, same luxury interior, etc. etc.) but with… 15,000 miles on the odometer (about 1,500 miles per annum of ownership). Its price: $90,000 (!!!).
All sorts of things come to mind, most of them unprintable anywhere except perhaps on this website.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there is no justification — none — that can justify the prices of these upscale cars (and of the supercars we will not speak because Ferrari and the other thieves only make a few of them each year, thus ensuring their consistent “value proposition” — read: snob appeal for the terminally-insecure rich).
Of course, the thieves (and their sycophantic customers) will cry out that it’s all the new whizz-bang technology (“All hail Technology!!!”) that makes their cost of manufacture rocket into the stratosphere.
Unfortunately, as Metcalfe points out in his video, more and more people are looking at all that technology, what’s involved and how much money (not to mention weight) that it adds to the car, and are saying, “Eeeeehhhh I don’t think so, Luigi.”
Which, by the way, might account for this atrocity:
Looks like the More Money Than Sense crowd are taking the $340 grand they would have dropped on a new jazzed-up Bentley, and instead splurging it on a rebuilt version of Ferrari’s entry-level model of the 1970s.
At least the Dino is bereft of anything that could remotely resemble a micochip.
There is a companion piece to this post: it’ll appear next week.
Seems like Britishland’s little darling has been having problems:
Emma Raducan, 21, shot to fame after winning the US Open in 2021 as an 18-year-old. She had been handed a £125,000 911 Carrera GTS Cabriolet under a lucrative sponsorship with the luxury motor brand which began in 2022.
However, what sponsors giveth, they may also taketh away:
However, last month Raducanu saw her pride and joy taken from her after the company “took it back”. One of her associates is quoted by the Daily Mail as saying: “Emma no longer has a Porsche. They took it back. It used to have pride of place at her home.”
Porsche has a history of suddenly pulling the plug on sponsorship deals they do not feel are value for money, including when athletes are not meeting expectations.
…and our little girl has won pretty much nada since her US Open victory, so perhaps it was unsurprising.
Anyway, she had a two-word comment of joy the other day, because apparently Porsche gave her another one (I suppose because they didn’t want to look like the heartless bastards they are).
Had I been a well-paid tennis star going through a bad patch, I know what my two-word response would have been after the snatchback: “Hello, Ferrari.”
Along with several more words, few of them printable in a newspaper, and not very complimentary towards Porsche either.
But that’s just me.
Afterthought: Of course, Emma could always have gone with Mercedes, judging by their own recent losing record in Formula One… kindred spirits, so to speak. [/snark]
Never checked my email over the weekend because I had other stuff to do. So I opened the program just now, to find this in my Inbox:
It’s not the sale price that offends me (that much): it’s becoming increasing difficult to find a decent rifle for less than a grand nowadays (sigh).
But two grand (regular price)? For a Marlin lever rifle?
Has the world gone fucking crazy?
Then again, there’s this:
…which seems too good to be true. (I don’t know who “SDS” is, but whatever.) If I were to guess, that might need a few hundred bucks in gunsmithing to make it acceptable, but I could be wrong. (I do like the lanyard ring, by the way.)