Holy Shit, J. C. Penney

Ron Johnson was on the roll to end all roles in 2011. He was the man behind the Apple Store. He transformed computer sales from the darkly-lit fringe outfits of the '90s to the bright, minimalist, inviting atmosphere of today. In many ways, he made technology cool, and as a result he saw his bank account grow by some $400 million.

J. C. Penney, hungry for a hip new image, saw an enormous opportunity in Johnson. They brought him on as CEO in November of 2011 and tasked him with turning their tired old retail outfit into a hipster paradise of Apple proportions. So Johnson set to work.

"My ideas are big, you guys."

Step one: he hired a fellow Apple veteran as COO and fired a number of the stuffy old suits at JCP. He was taking the company in a new direction, and their input would be outdated.

Step two: he started courting hip brands, with the goal of redefining the type of person who shops at J. C. Penney.

"Seriously, though. Really big."

Step three: he took a jackhammer to the dishonest pricing policies of the old retail market. This was the big one. Standard practice in retail is to price everything on the high end, then have special discounts literally all the time to bring the price down to something that isn't exciting, but fair. Johnson wanted that to change. He repriced everything JCP carried to a lower, fairer price, then did away with constant coupons and specials.

It was a refreshing way for a CEO to look at business. He was keeping the actual, long-term interests of customers in mind. He was treating them like mature adults. Not children. Not sheep to be easily led astray by bright, flashy colors and big red lines through high dollar values and sunbursts with percentages in them. His ideas were truly visionary.

"Like, this big!"

And they failed harder than any ideas in the history of retail. I mean, they nearly ran J. C. Penney, a century-old institution, into the ground. As it turns out, people like instant gratification. They respond to it. They almost demand it. It makes them feel clever. When Johnson took that away from his customers, they took their business away from him.

J. C. Penney's stock price was cut in half during Johnson's tenure. Feedback from employees and customers alike was almost universally disdainful. After just over a year, he was removed from his position as CEO.

"Oh. Well, shit."

There are two lessons to be learned from this epic failure to market properly. The first is that retailers scam the shit out of you. Their sales practices are deceitful, and are based on the idea that you'll pay full price if you have a coupon pretending that "full price" is a discount. The second is that, if they didn't do these things all of these companies would die. Because we secretly like it.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Memory (and Photography)!

I think we can all agree that memory is weird. So weird, in fact, that I'm only going to focus on one aspect of memory in this post. It's a newly discovered thing that Neo-Luddites (now there's an oxymoron) have been bemoaning ever since cameras came with phones.

Pictures. That is, the incessant picture-taking of the kids-these-days generation. The kids these days traditionally respond by claiming that taking pictures helps them remember important events. "But sight is only one sense," the Neo-Luddites retort, "and you're so focused on taking pictures you forget to use the rest of your senses, or even actually see what you're recording."

"Pish-posh," say the youths, and they skateboard away full of mirth and truancy or whatever. I'm not really young anymore, I don't know.

This came up when I googled "kids these days," so I guess it's possible that they've switched to unicycles

Well, the Neo-Luddites have new ammunition in their constant struggle against new and exciting things. Linda Henkel, a psychologist at Fairfield University, decided to find out whether of not they have a point through the clever use of science. It turns out they do.

Henkel sent a bunch of college students into an art museum and told them to photograph some pieces but just look at others. When they were quizzed later on, they were significantly more likely to remember small details if they hadn't taken a photo. Which means our brains really do subconsciously use photos as a memory crutch.

It's like that old drug PSA, but way less serious. And Rachel Leigh Cook isn't going to destroy your kitchen over it.

Before you Neo-Luddite readers get too excited, you should know that the rule is not absolute. When instructed to take photographs of specific details instead of an object as a whole, their memory was just fine. And that's not just on the detail they zoomed in on - zooming in on one detail made them as likely to remember all the details as students who took no pictures.

So next time you want to savor a moment, either savor it without the use of a camera or savor a few very specific details of it when you take a picture. Because otherwise your memory will partially shut down like the lazy young whippersnapper it is.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the New Coke!

Let's say you're a soft drink manufacturer. In fact, you're the biggest soft drink manufacturer in the world. You're on top of the world for almost a century, keeping a huge majority of the market for yourself. Life is good. Then suddenly, one of your chief rivals decides to try a new markeitng thing and actually prove that people prefer Pepsi to your smelly old Coke in blind taste tests.

That's the position in which the Coca-Cola company found themselves in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Pepsi had introduced the "Pepsi Challenge," where random people would participate in blind taste tests and regularly choose Pepsi over Coke. It was a devastating blow to morale at poor, folksy old Coca-Cola, and the sales figures weren't helping. Between 1940 and 1980, Coca-Cola's market share dropped from a comfortable 60% to a terrifying 24%.

Pictured is (one of the buildings at) their rickety old mom-and-pop multinational corporate headquarters

So they sprang into action. The President of Coca-Cola and the VP of Marketing developed a radical rebranding strategy that would involve not only introducing a new, sweeter version of the famous beverage, but discontinuing the original. Enormous amounts of money went into meticulously crafting the new formula and taste testing it against both Pepsi and the old Coke. They called it Project Kansas.

If there's a better name for a project that would ultimately fail to excite anyone in a positive way, I haven't heard it.

And it won. Big time. It was poised to be the new favorite drink of the entire world. In 1985, they gave the green light. All at once, Coca-Cola stopped selling their old drink and launched the New Coke. If you or anyone you know was alive and cognizant during the 1980s, you know what happened next: a complete, unmitigated, cluster-fucking disaster.

Coca-Cola, April of 1985

It's not that people didn't like the taste of the New Coke. Research showed they liked it better than anything. It just wasn't Coke, dammit. There were some initial successes, but the backlash was outrageous. Coca-Cola's hotline saw a 200% increase in calls, almost all of which were people talking about the old formula as though their favorite uncle had just died. Some were depressed. Some were angry. Some even threatened to sue. After three months of this, the company finally decided to relent. They announced that the classic recipe would be making a triumphant return. The news was so celebrated that it was brought up on the floor of the in-session United States Senate.

And that was the last time anyone did something pointless, misguided, and stupid on the Senate Floor

Here's the part where I prove myself wrong. I called the disaster "unmitigated," but the re-release of the original recipe was actually a massive mitigation. People were so relieved to have their familiar product back that Coca-Cola surged ahead in the market once again. After a few months (and, notably, the release of Cherry Coke), Coca-Cola enjoyed twice the sales as Pepsi.

Little by little, the company put New Coke behind them. Sales in the United States were discontinued shortly after Coca-Cola Classic came back. A few years later, the New Coke was more or less gone. Finally, in 2009, the "Classic" label was removed, and the last vestige of the massive failure turned enormous success was gone.

To sum up: Pepsi, to most people, simply tastes better than Coke. But taste is almost insignificant compared to the power of familiarity and nostalgia.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Hook!

I'm gonna disappoint some of you loyal readers when you learn that I'm not referring to one of the best adventure movies to come out of the early nineties. Instead, I'm here to tell you about a song that came out three years later. The song that called us all idiots to our face, and we sat here bobbing our heads and proving Blues Traveler's point.

It was this movie. And if you disagree you can shut your mouth, Philistine.

"Hook" ripped its chord structure directly from Pachelbel's Canon in D. That's the song you hear at weddings that might as well be called "Here Comes Everyone Who is Not the Bride." The progression is eerily powerful as an earworm. It's a song that will inevitably described as either Good or Catchy by anyone who hears it, even if they don't like it.

That's why it was chosen. Not in a nefarious way or even out of capitalistic self-interest...sort of. It was an artistic choice in the same way the title "Hook" was. As were the lyrics, which you probably don't remember even seconds after you belt them at the top of your lungs. They're surreptitious and overt all at once.

Like Bryan Cranston disguising himself as Heisenberg

You see, "Hook" is a song about how easy it is to manipulate people into enjoying trite, simplistic, boring music. The only thing original about it is its self-awareness. If you don't believe me, just check out some of the lyrics:

It doesn’t matter what I say
So long as I sing with inflection
That makes you feel that I’ll convey
Some inner truth of vast reflection

But I’ve said nothing so far
And I can keep it up for as long as it takes
And it don’t matter who you are
If I’m doing my job then it’s your resolve that breaks

Because the hook brings you back
I ain’t tellin’ you no lie
The hook brings you back
On that you can rely

The hook John Popper is referring to is the musical concept of a riff that catches your ear and makes you stick around to hear the rest of the song. It worked, too. "Hook" peaked at 23 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It got there by telling its audience that they were going to be taken in by the composition of the song and convinced that it said something meaningful even though it didn't.

And we obliged. Which actually kind of makes it an interesting song. Hell, check out the video:

If you can get past the incredibly '90s hair and tucked in t-shirts (and the realization that Paul Schaffer was in Blues Traveler), you'll see a perfect companion piece to the song. It's a guy watching television and being taken in by contestants in a beauty pageant and a Citizen Kane-esque politician, all of whom are literally telling him that he's only listening because of the way their words are presented, not what they're actually saying.

And the more you listen to the rapid-fire third verse, the more you understand that it's just John Popper saying, "This is really low and valueless as art, but hell, it'll make me some money."

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Phineas Gage!

Phineas Gage had an especially rough day at work. It was 1848 and he was a foreman on a railway construction project in Vermont. There was a big outcropping of rock in the way, so naturally Phineas decided to blow it to hell with blasting powder. It's possible that he neglected to add sand to his magic explosion powder, and as a result his day worsened significantly.

As he was packing the explosives into place with a tamping iron, the iron made a spark. If you've ever been around gunpowder and sparks, you can probably guess what the result was. It was an explosion. It drove the iron, with terrific force, back out of the hole and into Phineas Gage's face, where it created a brand new hole of its own.

It was a way less meticulously dug hole, too.

The effect of this (what surgical journals would later refer to as, I shit you not) abrupt and intrusive visitor was to literally destroy both his left eye and his left frontal lobe. Of his brain. The thing that tells the rest of your body what to do all the time. In most instances, this sort of injury is accompanied by almost instantaneous death. Not for Phineas Gage, though. He survived and even sat up on his own after a few minutes.

In fact, while the injury ultimately did lead to his death, it would take about another twelve years to get around to it. In that time, Phineas Gage became a marvel of the psychological and neurological science communities. When the tamping iron took out a chunk of his brain, it appeared to have taken most of his "how to not be an asshole" knowledge with it, so naturally Gage turned into kind of an asshole for a while.

Like this but smaller and less feline.

Which was a huge deal. It seemed to confirm suspicions that our actions are, in a way, preordained by the contents of our brains. This played right into the hands of phrenologists, a large group of charlatans who managed to convince much of the scientific community that our personality types are dictated largely by where our heads are bumpiest. The fact that Gage had a dramatic swing in his behavior after part of his brain was destroyed was pretty compelling.

Part of the "White People are Just the Greatest" branch of pseudo-science

However, a recently discovered report seems to indicate that Phineas Gage got back to his old self by the time he died of a massive seizure in 1860. Either he re-learned the social conventions that had been literally blown out the top of his head, or there was a fundamental problem with the model of phrenology. Which there obviously was, since it's been thoroughly debunked anyway.

Maybe it was just an enormous amount of stress that had caused the change. I mean, he had suffered quite a bit of trauma. That much trauma is bound to cause some disorder in his life involving stress.

HEY WAIT A SECOND WE HAVE A NAME FOR THAT KIND OF THING!

Holy shit.