Category: Business

Want Ads With That?

Business

How nice:

Amazon Prime to streaming customers: pay $2.99 per month or go back to watching commercials

Streaming services are in a heated tug-of-war over viewers and users are growing more adept at jumping in and out of those services, often depending on price. The platforms risk losing customers with price hikes, but they could lose them if they don’t generate new content that wins over users.

Disney will begin charging $13.99 a month in the U.S. for ad-free Disney+ in mid-October, 75% more than the ad-supported service. Netflix already charges $15.49 per month for its ad-free plan, more than twice the monthly subscription for Netflix with ads.

Amazon said limited advertisements will be aired during shows and movies starting early next year so that it can “continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time.”

I haven’t seen much evidence that Amazon has created much in the way of “compelling content” (i.e. stuff that we actually want to see), so I’m not sure how I’m going to respond to this new little bit of Shylockian chiseling.  We don’t buy that much from Amazon anyway, unless there’s absolutely no local shopping alternative or the products’ manufacturers don’t offer online sales, so our shipping costs aren’t that high to begin with, ergo  there’s not much in the way of saving through Prime.

And am I the only one who spends almost as much time looking for something decent to watch as actually watching a show?  (Ditto Netflix, by the way.)

I understand the business model — there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch TV show — but included in the business model is the fact that some consumers won’t go along with the latest pricing structure.  And in fact I don’t really mind if ads play before a show, even though they’re irritating.  But during a show?  Forget that shit.

What I’ll most probably do is suspend our Prime subscription altogether after Christmas, and if we absolutely must shop through Amazon thereafter, wait and consolidate our purchases into one delivery.

I guess we’ll see how all this plays out.

Roost, Chickens Coming Home To

Corporate Wokism, Crime

Well, well, well.  Here’s the macro event:

Hours after murder charges against a former Philadelphia police officer were dropped on Tuesday, large groups, mostly made up of teenagers, looted multiple stores in the city. 

Police started receiving calls around 8 p.m. Tuesday night about a large crowd moving into Center City, the main dining and shopping scene in downtown Philadelphia, NBC 10 reported. The crowd eventually turned riotous, ransacking a Foot Locker, Lulumelon, and an Apple store, among other businesses, before at least 20 were arrested. 

Note that Philly has one of those “Soros-style” prosecutors who distinguish themselves by not prosecuting anyone for crimes like this.  There’s also evidence that, far from being “spontaneous”, the raids are being coordinated and targets established via social media — almost the very definition of organized crime.

And speaking of targets, here’s a micro event:

Target is closing nine stores in major cities across four states, claiming theft and organized retail crime have made the environment unsafe for staff and customers – and unsustainable for business.

The big box chain is part of a wave of retailers – both large and small – that say they’re struggling to contain store crimes that have hurt their bottom lines. Many have closed stores or made changes to merchandise and layouts.

…which is likely to cause an epidemic of Schadenböners among conservatives because the Minneapolis retailer is easily one of the wokest corporations in the world.

The only good thing about the Philly situation, by the way, is that unlike the Portland OR police, some Philly cops are getting into the spirit of the thing.

Try to contain your guffaws of delight.  I couldn’t.

Broken Neighborhoods

Business, Crime

I was interested, although not surprised, to see this development:

High-end retail shops in California’s iconic Beverly Hills have reportedly begun to shutter their doors amid an epidemic of smash-and-grab robberies.

To be fair, a whole bunch of them had already closed because of California’s stringent WuFlu lockdown a couple years back.  But this latest “epidemic of smash-and-grab robberies” is absolutely the fault of the politicians and the voters who put them there.

Yup:  being soft on crime, whether allowing overt riots of the BLM genre or having the “shoplifting isn’t really a crime” mindset, can only lead to more and yet more lawlessness — something you’d think would be blindingly obvious to the dumbest of the dumb.

Clearly, Californians fall even below the above definition.

Let Beverly Hills sink — and the rest of that poxy state along with it.

Rebound

Business, Food & Drink, Management

Well, this is interesting:

Anheuser-Busch heir Billy Busch said he would be the first to buy back Bud Light should the beer’s parent company AB InBev want to sell it.

“If they don’t want that brand any longer, sell it back to the Busch family,” Busch told Outkick host Tomi Lahren. “Sell it to me. I’ll be the first in line to buy that brand back from you, and we’ll make that brand great again.”

Busch explained how disheartening it has been to watch the beer brand, which was so much a part of his childhood, lose its legacy of valuing its customers and employees.

“That culture is completely gone now,” Busch said. “They knew who their drinkers were. … Even my dad at 89 years old, 90 years old, he was still going to the bars selling Budweiser back in those days.”

“We’ve always cared very, very much about the people in America. What made this company great was America, of course,” he continued.

Busch added that AB InBev has missed the mark in knowing its customer base.

“When you are a foreign company and you rely on these woke students that are coming out of these local colleges to do your advertising for you, you’re making a big mistake,” he noted.

Even if they got Bud Light back, I still wouldn’t buy it because it’s shit beer, but that’s not the point.

I don’t know if anyone knows this, but Auggie Busch (Augustus III) has been a lifelong supporter of concealed carry — mostly, it should be said, because of the need to protect his delivery drivers from hijacking.  The family has always been true-blue (red?) American (unusual for a wealthy family) and intensely patriotic, always with traditional values very much in evidence.  A cursory look at older Budweiser ads — the pre-woke ones, that is — will bear that out.

And was there any better or more American an institution than this?

Oh, and if Billy wants a new relaunch payoff line for his acquisition, here it is:

Same Beer, Different Attitude!

Yer welcome.

Stupid Argument

Business, Celebrities, Two-Minute Hate

Loath as I would ever be to bestow any kind of acknowledgment to the Ginger Whinger’s Duchess CaringSlut, on this issue I am firmly on her side.

The Duchess of Sussex once wore diamonds grown in a lab on a royal jaunt, but jeweller Eddie LeVian is not impressed. 

‘I’m concerned people think it’s the same as a diamond,’ he tells me at the Tower of London, where his brand Le Vian hosted a show. ‘It’s misleading.’

Of course, he makes his livelihood pimping overpriced rocks for the ghastly De Beers diamond criminal cartel, so of course he would sniff at “man-made” diamonds as not being “the real thing” — although they actually are.  Even if they were grown in a clean laboratory somewhere instead of having been hauled out of the ground by child laborers in Africa, their chemical composition, their hardness and appearance make them real diamonds, absolutely indistinguishable from their bloody African cousins.

Which of course makes the diamond industry quake in their expensive handmade boots, because it means the end of their tidy little cartel which has established itself by dint of creating an artificial shortage through the imposition of “controls” mostly illegal — ask yourself why De Beers doesn’t have an office in the United States (RICO coff coff ).  And gawd forbid that diamonds should be priced at even semi-precious levels rather than as the horribly-overpriced geegaws they are.

So while the Duchess Formerly Known As Third Actress From The Right may well have worn said manufactured gems because of Evil Child Labor Exploitation — not actually a bad reason, for once — the fact remains that all the pouting about the diamonds being fake is being driven, as always, by the greed and self-preservation instincts of the fucking awful diamond industry.

Who are far, far worse a cancer on society than the Markle creature could ever be, try as she may.

Lures

Lies and Untruths, Marketing / Advertising

Last week I received in my email something from these guys:

…with the following message:

Walmart, a company who’s known to be one of the biggest supporters of conservative causes, has just bowed to evil liberal demands.  Here’s what happened…

Several major companies (including Amazon, Walmart, Barnes & Noble and more) have decided it’s against Americans’ best interests to carry a new book on their store shelves.  And the reason why should have you fuming…

The book is called The First 72 Hours.

The First 72 Hours was written by one of the world’s leading survival authors, Damian Campbell.

And the reason these companies won’t allow you to buy his book is because it exposes how the left is using the current political unrest to steal our freedom in ways we never imagined…

And it teaches you how to prepare for the coming collapse.

The secrets in this book are well-known by government insiders…

And Campbell has put them all in this book in an attempt to warn you about what is going to happen in the next few months.

Since Campbell isn’t allowed to sell this book in stores we convinced him to let us hand out a few copies at a deep discount.

Right now we have permission to give 50% OFF copies to the next 288 people who click here.

However, once you get access to this book you’ll need to review it ASAP.

I can’t tell you when the S will hit the F. But I can tell you Jesus was right that no man knows the hour – and that we should be vigilant and prepared.

Get your copy of The First 72 Hours for 50% OFF before they’re gone… and before it’s too late.

Being of a suspicious nature when people send me stuff and want me to spend money with them, I did a little investigation for myself.  I didn’t look at Walmart, because the next time I buy a book at Wally World will be the first time, and the last time I bought anything at B&N was when we were still homeschooling the kids.

So onto Teh Intarwebz I went.  A whole two minutes later, I came across this:

…so the second paragraph contained at least one lie, which kind of pissed me off right there.

But my ire having been aroused, I decided to do a little more digging, and found the following:

  • the book is under 100 pages long — and for $40, I want something a little more substantial than what is basically a bullet-point list.
  • it’s apparently published by “Prepared Patriots”, which printing house doesn’t exist.
  • However, there is a website called PreparedPatriot.com, which sells the usual tactical / survival stuff.  Are they the “publishers” of said book?  Well, no — at least, I found no mention of the book anywhere on the website.

Well, what about this “Firearm Man” guy (or org)?  Searching for “firearm-man.com” takes one here:

  • “firearm-man.com” is just a fucking newsletter;  basically, a means whereby people can send out spam to whoever.

So:

Fuck them, fuck their newsletter, and by the way, fuck Damian Campbell and his poxy little expensive brochure.  I wouldn’t accept it as a gift, now.

Caveat emptor, y’all.