A Gobbledy First: An All Readers' Corner Edition
And did Red Wing Shoes punish their workers by not having a sale?
Hello Gobbledeers,
Did you all have a great Labor Day weekend? I celebrated by outsourcing the labor for this column to Gobbledy readers. Welcome to the very first All Readers’ Corner issue of the newsletter.
While you were enjoying the days off, I hope you remembered the true meaning of Labor Day. If you didn’t, Red Wing Shoes sent out this email last week becrying the lost meaning of the holiday:
The real Labor Day isn’t about discounts or gimmicks. Gimmicks like sending out an email saying this isn’t a sale, rather it’s a promotional email offering 0% off your purchase this weekend. And by buying shoes at full price, you can help reclaim Labor Day’s true meaning. It’s not about gimmicks like that at all.
There’s a scene in the early 90’s Seattle-n-Grunge-related rom-com Singles where the Campbell Scott character is hitting on someone and he says that he doesn’t want to play games, and that he doesn’t have an act he puts on to get women. And the woman replies:
I think that, a) you have an act, and that, b) not having an act is your act.
Red Wing Shoes - I think a) you have a gimmick; and b) not having a gimmick is your gimmick.
One other sketchy thing about this - they’re donating 100% of their profits to workers. That’s fantastic. But why would selling at full price mean that their profits are higher? A 30% off sale could certainly generate lots more demand to outweigh the lower per-boot margin, and they could have more total dollars to donate.
Hm.
Did Red Wing Shoes screw their workers by refusing to have a Labor Day Sale? Asking for a friend.
(Thanks to frequent reader/contributor A.S. for that one).
Gobbledy readers may remember our earlier discussion of the $4.98 orange bucket from Home Depot, and how Yeti was selling a not-dissimilar bucket for $40.
Someone posted on Reddit this photo of the bucket on the luggage carousel at an airport:
He wrote:
Yes. I’m aware how ridiculous this is. Trust me, if I didn’t have to go through the process of checking an empty bucket, I wouldn’t.
My job required the use of a bucket. My plane was arriving at 11PM, after all the bucket stores** closed. My job started at 5AM, before the bucket stores opened. So I had to bring my own.
(**Editor’s note: I love the idea that there are stores that only sell buckets.)
This has absolutely nothing to do with anything, but I’ve been rooting for the Home Depot orange bucket since I wrote that column, and that $40 bucket really pissed me off. When push came to shove and a guy needed to check a bucket for the flight to his job site, he chose the orange bucket. Screw you, Yeti bucket!
(Hat tip to View from the Wing for bringing this to my attention).
I’m on a Slack group with a bunch of other B2B marketing types, and one of the running conversations/gags is people complaining about SDRs** sending them too many irrelevant emails trying to sell them software and how SDRs are incredibly annoying and the tactic doesn’t work and then they admit that of course their own company uses SDRs and that the SDRs report into them. (Marketers like to complain about problems of their own making).
** (Sales Development Reps - the people who do outbound sales calls and emails)
Anyhoozit, the complaints are really about the poorly written outreach emails, for which there is plenty of blame to go around. But reader and coffee gift purveyor Matt B. passed along the best cold outreach email I’ve ever seen.
Bravo, creative agency Dottob.
McKinsey usually does a really good job with their thought leadership pieces - well written, with graphics that are clear. (They do a slightly less good job when it comes to not exacerbating the opioid crisis…but I digress).
But this graphic from a recent report is a confounding mishmosh of gobbledy.
Do the “three categories” in the headline “Collaborative interactions falls into three categories” refer to the icons labeled “Virtual,” “In person” and “Other Mechanisms”? Or to the left column of “Decision making,” “Creative solutions and coordination” and “Information Sharing?”
But the “Interactions” column has lots of different kinds of interactions, not just 3.
I also like that the outcome of one of the meetings is “preparation for a decision meeting.” So you have the meeting to be able to prepare for yet another meeting.
This is barely terrible compared to what Gartner puts out (see below), so I don’t want to make too big a deal of it. But for McKinsey, it’s a mess. I’d suggest they focus on more Creative Solutions and Coordination via an Innovative Session held in-person to Identify Innovative Solutions using Innovative Problem Solving to come up with Potential Innovative Solutions.
That should fix it.
I’m not kidding about this: I think Gartner is trolling me. Yes, I know the world revolves around me, and billion dollar companies create crazy-ass graphics like this just for the many hundreds of Gobbledy readers. That’s obvious.
It’s odd, because interactions I’ve had with Gartner analysts have been great. They know their stuff, understand the markets they cover.
But these graphics.
This is a good place for me to note that I have exactly zero graphic-related abilities. Like in kindergarten - this actually happened - I was given an “unsatisfactory” for art. In kindergarten. I was sent home with a report card where, next to the subject “Art” it said, “unsatisfactory.” Giving 6 year olds an “unsatisfactory” was an educational strategy back in the 1970s. It definitely didn’t affect me in any sort of long-term way. Not at all.
But even someone with unsatisfactory-for-kindergarten level artistic skills would look at this and think, “and they gave ME an unsatisfactory in art?????”
Thanks to reader RS for passing these along.
Seen any ridiculous software graphics? I’d love to see them - I’m at jared@sagelett.com
If anyone is attending the Iterable Activate Summit in San Francisco this week, I’m speaking there on Friday morning. Please come say hello…
And if anyone you know loves art, please let them know about Gobbledy. I’ll split the subscription revenue with you.
Is there some irony in the fact that checking the orange bucket might have cost more than the Yeti bucket, assuming the orange bucket was less than 40 pounds?