I suppose it can only be regarded as part of the price of admission for having been online for 30 plus years that you end up on more marketing lists than you can possibly imagine.
Consequently, I receive emails and I am served all manners of advertising for a variety of products and services that somebody somewhere evidently thinks I "should be" interested in.
Maybe I'm just a strange bird, but the vast majority of these attempts at marketing me something miss the mark by a chasm so great that the Grand Canyon looks like a crack in the pavement, by comparison.
If anything, these marketing attempts serve mostly as a reminder to me that I clearly am extremely far removed from the broader societal impression of what a person like me "should" like.
I've often made the comment that I am an extremely poor consumer, to the point of almost being unpatriotic, because I mostly have very little interest in things and relatively little interest in services and experiences that cost money to engage in. I don't even watch streaming movies anymore, if they cost more than $4.99 to rent.
Just this evening, we were going to watch a movie... but at $19.99 for a rental (48 hours) there's no way in hell! The "value" I get by watching the movie does not fit in with the price, in terms of hours of effort. So... no sale.
Which I suppose is a fancy way of saying it's very difficult to market anything to a boring bump on a log, such as myself!
I suppose what amazes me most about all this is the great extent to which companies clearly are being very successful as a result of pandering to people's egos. Which, in turn, serves as a reminder that most people on the planet seem to be largely — or almost completely — driven by their egos, rather than by rational thought and common sense. Which, in turn (part II), it is evidently how I ended up with the perception that I'm a boring bump in a log because I pretty much don't give a damn!
But then again, I never really gave a damn, even when I was young and (allegedly) hot stuff.
Which brings me back to the aspect of marketing I started out with: Marketers make a lot of assumptions based on relatively generic data.
Which I believe is a side effect of the way our world is almost entirely focused on maximizing profits rather than seeking to create customer satisfaction.
It's a problem — at least as I see it — because the profit orientation means that producers and marketers are not going to do much to cater to individual tastes. They largely depend on offering people limited (most profitable) choices, rather than the choices many consumers actually want.
I see this at grocery stores, where chains often replace the inexpensive house brand with a premium brand with higher profit margins. I no longer have the choice to buy the modest house salad dressing... I can only get more expensive brands.
Of course, I am a "bad consumer" because I look at that and declare "Hells no, I'm just going to make my OWN salad dressing" as a result of which the store loses the sale entirely.
But most people don't think like that... they just knuckle under and keep supporting the system that slowly keeps draining them dry.
I just wish more people did think a bit more critically...
Thanks for stopping by and have a great week ahead!
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2026.09.13 22:55 PDT
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