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If you went to the Black Friday sales last night (or early this morning, depending on the store) you may be sick of the retail experience right now, but you can sit down, relax, have a nice drink, and read about how your favorite and not-so-favorite stores got started. Considering that most started out small and spread across the country, a store could be a pretty big deal before you ever got a chance to hear about it, much less shop there. For example, the business that became Toys “R” Us started back in 1948!
In 1948, 25-year-old World War II veteran Charles Lazarus began selling baby furniture in his father’s bike shop in Washington, DC. Recognizing the demand for children’s toys, Lazarus soon broadened his inventory and renamed the store Children’s Supermart. He opened Baby Furniture & Toy Supermarket in 1952, using backwards R’s in the sign to grab attention. Five years later, he opened Children’s Bargaintown, which became the first Toys “R” Us, in nearby Rockville, Md. The store’s giraffe mascot, Dr. G. Raffe, was renamed Geoffrey shortly before Lazarus sold Toys “R” Us to Interstate Stores in 1966.
Mental_ floss has the lowdown on this and ten other big box stores. Link
(Image by Flickr user dcmaster)
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Apparently the managers of FuncoLand, the equivalent of Gamestop in the 1990s, are crazy creeps from another dimension that delight in torturing new employees while acting like trailer park royalty. This 2 part training video probably made new hires wonder whether they’d just made a huge mistake, and watching these videos made me nostalgic for the goofiness of the 90s. I miss my Nintendo 64!
–via Joystiq
Attention
sheeple ... er, shoppers! You may not know it, but if you've ever entered
a Whole Foods Market, you've actually been "primed" to shop.
Martin Lindstrom, author of Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy, wrote an interesting article at FastCompany about how the popular market subtly persuades its shoppers to buy things.
Take, for instance, the stylish "chalk" drawn signs:
The prices for the flowers, as for all the fresh fruits and vegetables, are scrawled in chalk on fragments of black slate--a tradition of outdoor European marketplaces. It's as if the farmer pulled up in front of Whole Foods just this morning, unloaded his produce, then hopped back in his flatbed truck to drive back upstate to his country farm. The dashed-off scrawl also suggests the price changes daily, just as it might at a roadside farm stand or local market. But in fact, most of the produce was flown in days ago, its price set at the Whole Foods corporate headquarters in Texas. Not only do the prices stay fixed, but what might look like chalk on the board is actually indelible; the signs have been mass-produced in a factory.
Link (Photo: wfmmetcalf/Flickr)
Woot, the discount website that sells one item a day, has been bought by Amazon, which they are quite happy about. In addition to the above video posted at their blog, CEO Matt Rutledge wrote the most awesome memo ever announcing the acquisition to Woot employees.
We are excited about doing this for all sorts of reasons. One, our business model is so vague that there’s no way Amazon can possibly change what it is we’re truly doing: preparing the way for the rise of the Lava Men in 2012. Also, our deal means that Jason Toon will finally be released from that Mexican jail owned by Zappos honcho Tony Hsieh. No, don’t lie, Tony, we’ve seen the paperwork. And we need a powerful ally in case Steve Jobs finally breaks down and comes after us for all our Apple jokes over the years. Don’t think of it as a buyout; think of it as NATO!
Link -via Metafilter and Holy Kaw!
Eddie Feibusch sells zippers at his New York store ZipperStop. He’s been in business since 1941. There were once a lot of zipper shops in the garment district, but gradually they relocated overseas, leaving ZipperStop as one of the few remaining specialty shop where you can get a zipper in any size for any purpose.
So when a recalcitrant zipper threatened to be, or not to be, Queen Gertrude’s undoing in a Metropolitan Opera production of “Hamlet” last month, the Met dispatched a costumer, Michael Zacker, to Mr. Feibusch for a new zipper for Jennifer Larmore’s gown. “He really has great products,” Mr. Zacker said.
Retail, they go from 50 cents for a nylon dress zipper to $100 for a No. 10 brass zipper, 350 inches long, to wrap your hot-air balloon.
How great are zippers? Don’t even get Mr. Feibusch started. They are watertight for deep-sea divers, airtight for NASA. “Nothing replaces a zipper,” he said. Buttons? He made a face. “A button is unpleasant,” he said.
Link -via Jason Kottke
(image credit: Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times)
The Christmas shopping season began when stores opened early today to draw in bargain-hunters. When did the day after Thanksgiving become such a milestone? And where did the name Black Friday come from? The answers to these questions and more are at mental_floss today. Link
