CSotD: Friday Funnies – Fun for all, and all for fun!
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I think it cruel of Wayno, in this season of Fun Size Bars, to remind those of us old enough to know that the “Three Musketeers” bar was so named because — “All for fun and fun for all!” — it was large enough to share with two friends.
Granted, even in those days, businesses were in business to make money, and so the Three Musketeers was larger than a Snickers or a Clark Bar, but considerably fluffier. Still, if you only had a nickel, it gave you more volume for your money.
When you go back to your elementary school, everything seems a lot smaller than it was when you were there.
But I still think that, if you bought a Three Musketeers then and cut it into three pieces to share, each of you got more than if you simply doled out three Fun Size bars today.
Though if I could bring back something from a 50s childhood to see what it seemed like today, it might well be a Hostess Cupcake.
In this Edison Lee, Orville has been eating Twinkies, but, while Twinkies were better than Sno-Balls, the Hostess Cupcake was the main attraction, and here’s the thing: Candy bars have become smaller, but Hostess Cupcakes simply became crappier.
I blame Fidel Castro. Or possibly Kennedy. But the whole sugar embargo set candy and snack makers into a frenzy of reduced sizes and increased prices, and when they realized how much abuse and mediocrity we were willing to tolerate, it was Katy bar the door.
They occasionally bring back vintage recipes for soft drinks, and Mountain Dew in particular benefits from cane sugar and whatever else they put in it, back in the days when it would tickle your innards. When you have one of those, it reminds you of why we used to drink it.
I don’t think they’d want to remind us that Hostess Chocolate Cupcakes once tasted like chocolate and that the cream inside tasted good, too.
Best thing about Hostess Snack Cakes today is that the company can’t blame its ups and downs on the Internet like everyone else does. And, if you follow that link, you’ll see that they don’t, mostly because they don’t admit to having any ups and downs, which leads us to our
Juxtaposition of the Day
(Retail)
I covered annual performance reviews the other day, and the best thing I can say about them is that I only worked one place where they put me through that stomach-churning process.
But another place I worked had a standardized “self evaluation” form extruded from Corporate that you had to fill out in order to obtain your not-quite-the-cost-of-living increase.
The first year, I was able to fill in the part about how I had improved workplace safety, because we really had moved a couple of boxes from over by the copier to a corner, so that you’d be less likely to trip over them if you were enough of a schlimazel to trip over them in the first place.
But the next year I had nothing and so my self-evaluation kept bouncing back because I hadn’t improved workplace safety. So finally I put in that I had begun checking to make sure my shoelaces were tied and it went through, because nobody out in Iowa knew I wore loafers.
My poor boss, who had to initial that bullshit, got a good chuckle out of it, but I refer to him as “my poor boss” because he had to actually interact with the bozos at HQ and would occasionally share their wisdom with me at the close of the day when we were nearly alone in the circ department.
Which is to say that he was Marla, above, and victim of the Stuart phone calls in which they would announce our goals, goals that had nothing to do with selling newspapers, an activity which nobody at HQ had ever actually done, but everything to do with how much money they needed to make to keep up with their idiotic spending, which had included acquiring us in the first place.
Yes: They set corporate financial goals not by how much income they were likely to see but by how much money they would like to make.
Damn, they should have put that on the self-evaluation form: “How much of a raise would you like to get, in this best of all possible worlds?”
Anyway, my standard recommendation to my boss was that they should peg our circulation goals to the price of the stock, which always got a chuckle but never happened.
The day I left the company, our stock was trading at $40 a share and, within a year, it dropped down to about a dollar and we — they — were nearly delisted, but it’s back up to $1.95, which I think means you could sell a share and, after the broker fees, buy a pair of Hostess Cup Cakes, but not the good old-style kind. The shitty new kind.
I sold all my stock when I bailed, so I could laugh except I know a guy who believed in the company and had his entire retirement wrapped up in their stock, and he worked his ass off for those soulless, blood-sucking bastards.
Those are the folks who really get the shaft these days, and, speaking of shafts, they’re also the ones who believed the promises that coal mining was coming back and then got laid off and paid with rubber checks.
Anyway, a couple of months after I walked out, I got a call from my former assistant to tell me they’d handed our boss the cardboard box.
I called him at home and he hadn’t sounded so happy in years. Mind you, the day I told him I was quitting, he shook my hand and congratulated me, not on the new job but on getting the hell out of the old one.
Real Life Adventures sums up how far we’ve come from the days of “All for fun, and fun for all.”
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