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2 episodes with Montgomery Ward
3 episodes with Montgomery Ward
2 episodes with Montgomery Ward
2 episodes with Montgomery Ward
2 episodes with Montgomery Ward
2 episodes with Montgomery Ward
2 episodes with Montgomery Ward
2 episodes with Montgomery Ward
2 episodes with Montgomery Ward
Down Home Cajun Music- La Musique Encore, EncoreHackberry Ramblers- "Just Because" (Montgomery Ward 4816)Leo Soileau & his Three Aces- "Petit Ou Gros" (Bluebird 2197)Joe Falcon & Cleoma Breaux- "Fe Fe Ponchaux (Columbia 146904)The Alley Boys Of Abbeville- "Pourquois Te En Pen" (Vocalion 05423)Segura Brothers- "Bury Me In A Corner of the Yard" (Columbia 147654)Joe's Acadians- "Joe's Breakdown" (Bluebird 2073)Jolly Boys Of Lafayete- "High Society" (Decca 61915)J.B. Fuslier & his MerryMakers- "La Robe Barre" Bluebird 2063)Joe Falcon- "Le Nouveau Lafayette" (Decca 61902)Dixie Ramblers- "La Musique Encore, Encore" (Bluebird 2180)Rayne Bo Ramblers- "Jus Pasque" (Blueird 2037)John Bertrand & Milton Pitre-" Paramount 21076)Thibodeaux Boys- "La Vieux Vals An Onc Mack" (Bluebird 2038)Sons Of Acadians- "A Legire Ma Pauvre Idie" (Decca 66413)Leo Soileau & his Three Aces- "Hackberry Hop" (Bluebird 2171)Adam Trehan- "The Pretty Girls Dont Want Me" (Columbia 147635)Falcon Trio- "Mon Favori" (Bluebird 2180)J.B. Fuslier & his MerryMakers- "Chere Te Te" (Bluebird 2063)*All selections taken from the original 78 rpm records.
It was great! It sold! It's the bloody Beatles' White Album! And, no, Paul; we won't shut up. Because part one of the UBP Deep Dish on “The Beatles” is finally here! Tony and T.J. are sniffer-level giddy to discuss this album-unlike-any-other. And in part one, the Two Little Piggies delve into the history and packaging (#DingDongDingDong) of one of only two official Beatles-canon albums to be known, colloquially, by two names. (The other is “Tomorrow Never Knows”, which most first-gen fans know as, of course, “File Under Rock”.) And despite this record's massive length and girth (Sfx: a pained, guttural groan), Tony & T.J. find the time to ask:
Top 5 at 5- Solid as Montgomery Ward 1/4/23.
Chuck Heinz and Clint Scott in for Jamie Lent talk about the airline delays from the weekend, FDR taking over the Montgomery Ward, Texas Tech bowl hype, Tom Brady beating Dallas, and who would you rather the Cowboys face in the playoffs.
Welcome to episode 58 of the official podcast of Your Unofficial Boys. Every week we review beers, talk sports and discuss funny current events. Please like and Subscribe! Episode Guide: Beers of the Week: Frosted Sugar Cookie by Southern Tier Brewing Co. (Lakewood, NY) - Rating: 4.50 Barrel Aged 12 Dogs of Christmas by Thirsty Dog Brewing Co. (Akron, OH) - Rating: 4.75 Fact of the Week: Christmas trees were banned by President Teddy Roosevelt in the White House in 1901. Bicycle playing card company made decks of cards and gave them to the prisoners of war in Germany with hidden escape routes revealed when the cards were soaked in water as Christmas presents. Every year, Europeans decorate about 50 million live Christmas trees and the United States about 35 million. It takes on average 6-8 years for a Christmas tree to be fully grown, but it can take as long as fifteen years. Rudolph the Reindeer was created by the U.S. department store Montgomery Ward. Nearly six million dollars are spent during the holiday season on ugly Christmas sweaters. Jokes of the Week: What does Mrs. Claus get when she wears tight pants? Why does Santa always have a full sack? Your Unofficial News: Texas Cop Who Gave Homeless Man Shit Sandwich Gets Fired Again. 2-year-old rescued after being swallowed by a hippo. Robot Vacuum Took Photo of Woman on Toilet That Was Shared on Facebook. Unofficial Fanzone: NFL Standings NBA Standings. NHL Standings. Big MLB Free Agent Signs. Unofficial Thoughts: What is something you want for Christmas? What are your Holiday plans? Please go follow us on our social media and subscribe to our podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcast and Google Podcast. Also check out our website www.yourunofficialboys.com. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/your-unofficial-boys/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/your-unofficial-boys/support
River Ridge Mall opened in 1980 with Miller & Rhoads and Thalhimers. Sears and Leggett (now Belk) opened in 1981. JCPenney opened in 1983. Miller & Rhoads closed and became Montgomery Ward in 1990,[3] which closed in 1997 and became Value City in 1999. In 1992, the Thalhimer's store was converted to Hecht's,[4] which in turn became Macy's in 2006. CBL & Associates Properties acquired the mall from Faison in 2003.[5] --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wvuncommonplace/message
Get on the Bus was the first Spike Lee movie that Spike Lee did not appear in.
Sewing your own clothes is the original slow fashion. But buying clothes from a catalog comes in second! In part one of two, Jess (@jesinspace) joins Amanda to tackle the early history of catalogs, including Sears, Montgomery Ward, and JC Penney. Jess reveals something super special about her house. We'll ask the question: why do so many catalogs begin in Chicago? And then we'll touch on some catalogs of the 20th century, including Spiegel, Best, and Hammacher Schlemmer. Also: audio essays from Traci of Pryde Hantverk and Alyse of Curio Mrvosa.Go follow everyone on IG!Jess: @jesinspaceTraci: @pryde.hantverkAlyse: @curiomrvosaHave questions/comments/cute animal photos? Reach out via email: amanda@clotheshorse.worldWant to support Amanda's work on Clotheshorse? Learn more at patreon.com/clotheshorsepodcastClotheshorse is brought to you with support from the following sustainable small businesses:Picnicwear: a slow fashion brand, ethically made by hand from vintage and deadstock materials - most notably, vintage towels! Founder, Dani, has worked in the industry as a fashion designer for over 10 years, but started Picnicwear in response to her dissatisfaction with the industry's shortcomings. Picnicwear recently moved to rural North Carolina where all their clothing and accessories are now designed and cut, but the majority of their sewing is done by skilled garment workers in NYC. Their customers take comfort in knowing that all their sewists are paid well above NYC minimum wage. Picnicwear offers minimal waste and maximum authenticity: Future Vintage over future garbage.Shift Clothing, out of beautiful Astoria, Oregon, with a focus on natural fibers, simple hardworking designs, and putting fat people first. Discover more at shiftwheeler.comHigh Energy Vintage is a fun and funky vintage shop located in Somerville, MA, just a few minutes away from downtown Boston. They offer a highly curated selection of bright and colorful clothing and accessories from the 1940s-1990s for people of all genders. Husband-and-wife duo Wiley & Jessamy handpick each piece for quality and style, with a focus on pieces that transcend trends and will find a home in your closet for many years to come! In addition to clothing, the shop also features a large selection of vintage vinyl and old school video games. Find them on instagram @ highenergyvintage, online at highenergyvintage.com, and at markets in and around Boston.Blank Cass, or Blanket Coats by Cass, is focused on restoring, renewing, and reviving the history held within vintage and heirloom textiles. By embodying and transferring the love, craft, and energy that is original to each vintage textile into a new garment, I hope we can reteach ourselves to care for and mend what we have and make it last. Blank Cass lives on Instagram @blank_cass and a website will be launched soon at blankcass.com.St. Evens is an NYC-based vintage shop that is dedicated to bringing you those special pieces you'll reach for again and again. More than just a store, St. Evens is dedicated to sharing the stories and history behind the garments. 10% of all sales are donated to a different charitable organization each month. New vintage is released every Thursday at wearStEvens.com, with previews of new pieces and more brought to you on Instagram at @wear_st.evens.Vagabond Vintage DTLV is a vintage clothing, accessories & decor reselling business based in Downtown Las Vegas. Not only do we sell in Las Vegas, but we are also located throughout resale markets in San Francisco as well as at a curated boutique called Lux and Ivy located in Indianapolis, Indiana. Jessica, the founder & owner of Vagabond Vintage DTLV, recently opened the first IRL location located in the Arts District of Downtown Las Vegas on August 5th. The shop has a strong emphasis on 60s & 70s garments, single stitch tee shirts & dreamy loungewear. Follow them on instagram, @vagabondvintage.dtlv and keep an eye out for their website coming fall of 2022.Country Feedback is a mom & pop record shop in Tarboro, North Carolina. They specialize in used rock, country, and soul and offer affordable vintage clothing and housewares. Do you have used records you want to sell? Country Feedback wants to buy them! Find us on Instagram @countryfeedbackvintageandvinyl or head downeast and visit our brick and mortar. All are welcome at this inclusive and family-friendly record shop in the country!Selina Sanders, a social impact brand that specializes in up-cycled clothing, using only reclaimed, vintage or thrifted materials: from tea towels, linens, blankets and quilts. Sustainably crafted in Los Angeles, each piece is designed to last in one's closet for generations to come. Maximum Style; Minimal Carbon Footprint.Salt Hats: purveyors of truly sustainable hats. Hand blocked, sewn and embellished in Detroit, Michigan.Republica Unicornia Yarns: Hand-Dyed Yarn and notions for the color-obsessed. Made with love and some swearing in fabulous Atlanta, Georgia by Head Yarn Wench Kathleen. Get ready for rainbows with a side of Giving A Damn! Republica Unicornia is all about making your own magic using small-batch, responsibly sourced, hand-dyed yarns and thoughtfully made notions. Slow fashion all the way down and discover the joy of creating your very own beautiful hand knit, crocheted, or woven pieces. Find us on Instagram @republica_unicornia_yarns and at www.republicaunicornia.com.Located in Whistler, Canada, Velvet Underground is a "velvet jungle" full of vintage and second-hand clothes, plants, a vegan cafe and lots of rad products from other small sustainable businesses. Our mission is to create a brand and community dedicated to promoting self-expression, as well as educating and inspiring a more sustainable and conscious lifestyle both for the people and the planet.Find us on Instagram @shop_velvetunderground or online at www.shopvelvetunderground.comCute Little Ruin is an online shop dedicated to providing quality vintage and secondhand clothing, vinyl, and home items in a wide range of styles and price points. If it's ethical and legal, we try to find a new home for it! Vintage style with progressive values. Find us on Instagram at @CuteLittleRuin.Thumbprint is Detroit's only fair trade marketplace, located in the historic Eastern Market. Our small business specializes in products handmade by empowered women in South Africa making a living wage creating things they love like hand painted candles and ceramics! We also carry a curated assortment of sustainable/natural locally made goods. Thumbprint is a great gift destination for both the special people in your life and for yourself! Browse our online store at thumbprintdetroit.com and find us on instagram @thumbprintdetroit.Gentle Vibes: We are purveyors of polyester and psychedelic relics! We encourage experimentation and play not only in your wardrobe, but in your home, too. We have thousands of killer vintage pieces ready for their next adventure!
The ladies are joined by friend Teena to go over tips for a successful Thanksgiving! From recipes, to pick up lines to etiquette- we have you covered. There's even a listener story, don't forget your toilet table cloth! ;)Write us some of your cringe stories at [nervouslaughterpodcast@gmail.com](mailto:nervouslaughterpodcast@gmail.com)The socials: [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/nervouslaughterpodcast) | [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/NervousLaughterPodcast) | [Twitter](https://twitter.com/NervouslaughPod)
This week's episode feels like a long time coming. Spence and Spangler sit down with Everett and Christian from Foster Watch Company to talk about the 11 Atmos. The guys touch on the design process, Christian's point of view as more of a "normie" and how the entire project came together.We reference Montgomery Ward, Foster Road, podcasting, Jazz, you name it. This was the perfect way for 40&20 and Whiskey&Watches to bond over what looks to be a killer release. Even Joey Harrington agrees!
In episode #18 of the Bally Alley Astrocast podcast, the hosts, Chris and Adam, cover two games written in Bally BASIC called "Cross Country Racer" and "Star Wars" by Doug Shaeffer, an amateur Astrocade programmer. These games were archived, along with other programs, by Paul Thacker in February 2022 from an Astrocade collection bought on Ebay by Nate Reeder in January 2022. Paul says, "These seem to me to have been made for personal use rather than with a goal of publication, but there's still some cool stuff in here [...]." Also covered is one piece of feedback and some recent updates to the Bally Alley website." Recurring Links BallyAlley.com - Bally Arcade / Astrocade Website What's New at BallyAlley.com Bally Alley Blog Orphaned Computers & Game Systems Website Bally Alley Discussion Group Bally Arcade / Astrocade Atari Age Sub-forum Bally Arcade/Astrocade High Score Club Bally Alley Astrocast Facebook Page The Classic Gaming Bookcast - By Chris Federico Show Notes We have limited show notes again for this episode. If there's something in the podcast that you want to hear more about and a search on the Internet won't turn it up for you, then contact the Astrocade discussion group on Groups.io. "Cross Country Racer" by Doug Shaeffer - This is the first of two Bally BASIC games from the early 1980s that is covered in Astrocast #18. "Star Wars" by Doug Shaeffer - This is the second of two Bally BASIC games from the early 1980s that is covered in Astrocast #18. Doug Shaeffer Tapes - The complete tape archive of Doug Shaeffer's Astrocade Tape Collection. Bally Alley Update (October 22, 2022) - "Max Performs Magic" - This an ad called "Max Performs Magic" about the Datamax UV-1R ZGRASS Graphics System. It is from page 16 of "Back Stage," December 3, 1982. Bally Alley Update (October 24, 2022) - The Bally Shrine - This is a three-page printout of "The Bally Shrine" Website from 1999. The Bally Shrine was a website run by Charles Taylor in the mid-to-late 1990s. Bally Alley Update (October 26, 2022) - Montgomery Ward - 1983 - Astrocade for $29.99 - This is a Montgomery Ward advertisement for a blow-out sale on many game systems, among them is the Astrocade for $29.99. This ad, from the bottom-right of page 6-A, is from the December 4, 1983 edition of "The Baytown Sun," a newspaper from Texas. "CHRDIS" Articles by Mike Skala - The three-part "CHRDIS" articles describe how to use the Bally Arcade's built-in Character Display routine from within Bally BASIC to create fast graphic displays. First published in the November and December 1982 and February 1983 Arcadian newsletter. Mike Skala says, "I've seen quite a bit of software lately utilizing the Graphic Character Maker, a machine code routine that Arcadian has published in the past year. This allowed us to use a display routine from the on-board ROM and put complex graphics on the screen instantly, rather than a slow series of BOX and LINE commands. The major drawback here was when moving the graphics, erasing and redrawing: it left us with considerable flashing or blinking. If you have been with us for a while, you know that we are continually evolving and improving; the following tutorial is our new generation of screen animation for the Astrocade!" "CHRDIS" Software by Mike Skala - This is the AstroBASIC software in archived format. Feedback There is some feedback covered in this episode, and we would love to hear your thoughts and comments about this (or any) Astrocast episode or about your history with the Bally Arcade/Astrocade. The best way to contact us is via email at BallyAlley or through via the Bally Alley Discussion Group at Groups.io. Next Episode's Coverage Perhaps "AstroBASIC" will get some coverage in Episode #19. It makes sense, since Astrocast #18 covered two BASIC games. Astrocast #17 was supposed to cover the material in the "AstroBASIC" manual and it was recorded, but it didn't turned out the way I had hoped that it would sound, so the "AstroBASIC" manual overview has been put off until I can cover it with a co-host like Chris, a BASIC programming ninja, or Paul, who has also programmed in BASIC. We will also cover "Outpost 19," an AstroBASIC game by WaveMakers that will fit naturally into an episode that shares its numbering with the game. We also may try to cover a game that was released on cartridge, but that coverage may be bounced to a future episode because "Outpost 19" may be the most involved game written in BASIC on the Astrocade.
When a little girl's mother dies of cancer, a Christmas reindeer makes the world a brighter place. In 1939, when Robert May, a Montgomery Ward copywriter, decides to write a poem about a reindeer with a shiny nose, he hopes the world will become a brighter place. Many families could still feel the effects of the Great Depression. Instead of making the annual coloring book, Robert drafts an original Christmas story about an animal with holiday cheer. After all, his daughter, Barbara, loves reindeer, especially with Santa Claus and his sleigh. Although Sewell Avery, CEO of Montgomery Ward, is doubtful that the poem about a reindeer is the best idea, he approves Robert to write the piece. With the original name Rudolph, Robert sets off on brainstorming for the story. Coming home from work that evening, Robert sighs at the tiny, unkept two-bedroom Chicago apartment. He checks on his bedridden wife, who had been suffering from cancer for the past two years. He explains he's been working on his poem about Rudolph the reindeer all day again. His wife hopes his writing is a big hit with the shoppers, and his daughter runs to him to hear the latest version of the story. Although his daughter Barbara is sad that her mother is sick, she finds joy in her father's reindeer story. As Robert reads to his daughter at bedtime about a reindeer named Rudolph with a very shiny nose, she falls asleep. Later in the week, Mr. Avery agrees to consider drawings of Rudolph from Denver Gillan from the company art department. Robert tells Mr. Avery that he'll spend the whole weekend at the zoo with Denver. When Saturday morning comes, Barbara goes with her father and the artist to the zoo to make drawings of deer. Unfortunately, Barbara's mother is too sick to accompany them. The next week, Robert sits at his desk, scribbling on pads of paper and throwing them in the trash can. As he stares out the window, he cannot see through a thick fog from Lake Michigan. He realizes that Rudolph's nose can shine like a spotlight through the fog on Christmas Eve, so Santa can make his deliveries. While at work, when the phone rings, and Robert hears his wife's mother on the phone, he feels sick to his stomach. He sobs on the way to the hospital, trying to figure out how to tell his daughter that her mother has passed away. When he lays eyes on his daughter, she cries and cries and collapses in his arms, kicking and yelling. He tries to tell her about Rudolph, but she says he's not real; he's only a stupid reindeer. After his wife's funeral, Mr. Avery insists that Robert doesn't have to finish the Rudolph poem. Although Mr. Avery suggests he takes a couple weeks off, Robert insists on finishing it. He wants to finish the story for Barbara. After a few more weeks of writing, Robert bursts through his apartment door one evening and announces he has finished the story about Rudolph. His daughter is so pleased and thinks her mother would enjoy the story. By Christmas, 2.4 million copies of the poem are distributed to Montgomery Ward shoppers to great success. Rudolph is almost as important as Santa Claus, making the world a little brighter after all.
The Old Dogs ramble about... rambling - on the open highway. This ramble was insired by our first podnugget, the first cross-country road trip. We note the passing of Marsha Hunt, a veteran actress and activist who lived to one hundred and four. We take a look at the so-called Takeaway Rembrandt. We get a little salty with the Morton Salt Girl. and we find that great ideas often occur in the shower. The Old Dogs conversation is with Bob Dauber, whose career as a production guy included Montgomery Ward and... Barney?
Anna Davlantes, WGN Radio's investigative correspondent, joins Bob Sirott to share what happened this week in Chicago history. Stories include the first ChicagoFest, the dedication of Buckingham Fountain, Ernie Banks’ last home run as a Cub, and more. Sponsored by UChicago Medicine
Episode 372: Video Home System Killed the Betamax Star This week Host Dave Bledsoe gets all nostalgic with some old home videos only to discover something unspeakably horrible on a tape labeled “David's 12th Birthday” (Actual footage of his 12th birthday, god he was a fat little kid!) On the show this week we tell the tale of the most brutal conflict of the 1980's, the war between VHS and Beta (So…Much…Blood) Along the way we discover why Dave isn't allowed in any movie theaters anymore. (It would be better if it were a Pee Wee Herman thing) Then we dive right into the creation of home video, from its absurdly British beginnings to the mighty Titan that was Sony striding across the land. (Spoiler: Sony loses). Then we dig into General Curtis LeMay's porn preferences for reasons never truly explained, only to veer back on topic with the tale of two tape formats and the brief but bitter fight over which one would dominate the world. (It turns out to be the one that is slightly cheaper.) We wrap up with a delightful but completely irrelevant tangent on why people called Montgomery Ward department stores Monkey Ward. (Are there monkeys involved? You'll have to tune in to find out, or, you know, Google it.) Our Sponsor this week is Mondo Fast Eddie's Home Video, we got the tapes, you gotta have the machines. We open the show NEC's brand new video cassette machine and close with Lucy May Walker eulogizing the Radio Star. Show Theme: https://www.jamendo.com/track/421668/prelude-to-common-sense The Show on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheHell_Podcast The Show on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/whatthehellpodcast/ The Show on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjxP5ywpZ-O7qu_MFkLXQUQ www.whatthehellpodcast.com Give us your money on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/Whatthehellpodcast The Show Line: 347 687 9601 Closing Music: https://youtu.be/-6WWO6c7ud8 We are a proud member of the Seltzer Kings Podcast Network! http://seltzerkings.com/ Citations Needed: The quest for home video http://www.terramedia.co.uk/media/video/telcan.htm Sony CV Series Video http://www.smecc.org/sony_cv_series_video.htm The Decline and Fall of Betamax http://keyboardaerobics.blogspot.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-betamax.html Wikipedia: VHS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS#VHS_development Porn industry may be decider in Blu-ray, HD-DVD battle https://www.macworld.com/article/179767/pornhd.html Wikipedia: Videotape format war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war Uncited Additional Reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videocassette_recorder https://www.mediacollege.com/video/format/compare/betamax-vhs.html https://www.thrillist.com/vice/how-porn-influenced-technology-8-ways-porn-influenced-tech-supercompressor-com https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/christmas-shopping-for-a-vcrdvd-1981-vs-2009/#:~:text=Cost%20of%20a%20Sears%20VCR,%247.42%20(total%20private%20industries). https://keepthatshort.com/how-much-did-a-vcr-cost-in-the-80s https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/07/22/rip-to-the-vcr/ https://kodakdigitizing.com/blogs/news/5-things-you-might-not-know-about-betamax-tapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/History/sonyhistory-d.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Drummer Lars Ulrich was born into an upper-middle-class family in Gentofte, Denmark, on December 26, 1963. The son of Lone and tennis player Torben Ulrich. In February of 1973, Lars' father obtained passes for five of his friends to check out a Deep Purple (Smoke On the Water) concert held in the same stadium in Copenhagen as one of his tennis tournaments. When one of the dad's friends couldn't go, they gave their ticket to the nine-year-old Lars, who fell in love with the band and ran out and bought their album Fireball the next day. The concert and album greatly impacted Lars, inspiring the start of his music career. He received his first drum kit, a Ludwig, from his grandmother around 12 or 13. Lars initially intended to follow in his father's footsteps and become a badass tennis player, so he moved to Newport Beach, California, in the summer of 1980. Despite being ranked in the top ten tennis players of his age group in Denmark, Lars failed to make it into the seven-man Corona del Mar High School tennis team, solidifying his decision to focus on music. So, while living in Los Angeles in late 1981, Lars placed an ad in the L.A. newspaper, The Recycler, which read, "Drummer looking for other metal musicians to jam with. Tygers of Pan Tang, Diamond Head and Iron Maiden." Guitarists James Hetfield and Hugh Tanner of Leather Charm answered the advertisement. James Alan Hetfield was born on August 3, 1963, in Downey, California, the son of Cynthia Bassett, a light opera singer, and Virgil Lee Hetfield, a truck driver. James was nine years old when he first began piano lessons. He then started jamming on his half-brother David's drums, and finally, at 14, he began to play guitar with Robert Okner. He was also in a few bands as a teenager – one was "Leather Charm" with Hugh Tanner, and another was "Obsession." James said that Aerosmith was his primary musical influence as a child and that they were why he wanted to play guitar. His parents divorced in 1976 when he was 13. They were devout Christian Scientists, and following their beliefs, they strongly disapproved of medicine or any other medical treatment and remained loyal to their faith, even as James' mother, Cynthia, was dying from cancer. This lifestyle inspired many of his lyrics during his career with Metallica. For example, the songs "Dyers Eve" and "The God That Failed" from the albums "...And Justice for All" and "Metallica" touch on those topics. His mother, Cynthia, died of cancer in 1979 when Hetfield was 16 years old. After her death, James went to live with his older half-brother David. Although he had not formed a band, Lars asked Metal Blade Records founder Brian Slagel if he could record a song for the label's upcoming compilation album, Metal Massacre. Slagel accepted, and Ulrich recruited Hetfield to sing and play rhythm guitar. Lars and James officially formed the band known as "Metallica" on October 28, 1981, five months after they first met. A funny story; James' and Lars' first encounter was anything but promising. As Mick Wall wrote in his biography of the band "Enter Night", "neither James nor Hugh had anything good to say about [Lars]. The kid was 'weird' and 'smelled funny' [and] he couldn't even really play drums." Deeming the entire encounter something of a waste, James later recalled (in Wall's bio) that "we ate McDonald's, he ate herring. [Lars'] father was famous. He was very well off. Spoiled – that's why he's got his mouth. He know what he wants, he goes for it and he's gotten it his whole life." When asked what Lars remembers about their first meet up, in a Blabbemouth.com interview, he said: "I remember connecting with him," Lars responded. "I could see that, even though he was painfully shy or whatever, that there were some distinctive similarities. I spent six months talking to people about heavy metal, and they'd mention STYX, JOURNEY, KISS or whatever. I'd talk about ANGEL WITCH, DIAMOND HEAD or TYGERS OF PAN TANG. He had a connection to the music and the things I was throwing out there that seemed a little more authentic or trustworthy. Not much happened during that first meeting because he was kind of the wing man, or the plus one, for a guy named Hugh. If James was sitting here, he'd tell you that the drum kit I showed up with was in such bad shape that every time I hit the cymbal, it kept falling over — which is accurate. Hetfield and I ended up staying in touch, and when I came back from travelling in Europe a few months later, I called him up and said, 'Hey, do you want to play and see what happens?' And he was up for it." The band name, "Metallica," came from Lars' friend Ron Quintana, who was brainstorming names for a fanzine and was considering MetalMania or Metallica. After hearing the two monikers, Lars wanted Metallica for his band, so he suggested Quintana use MetalMania instead. That magazine wound up being a U.S. monthly magazine focusing on heavy metal music, which was published between 1985 and 1991 Guitarist Dave Mustaine replied to an advertisement for a lead guitarist where Lars and James asked him to join after seeing his expensive guitar equipment. In early 1982, Metallica recorded its first original song, "Hit the Lights," for the Metal Massacre I compilation. James Hetfield played bass, and rhythm guitar and sang, while Lloyd Grant was credited with a guitar solo and Lars Ulrich played drums. Lloyd was a Jamaican guitarist who was never officially in the band. Lloyd has said: "Me and Lars was jammin' down there in Orange County, California and we jam with a few people and we lookin' other people to jam with..." they met through The Recycler. "We were playing for a long time and he came down to my place my apartment once and he says and he keep asking me to come jam with the band, but I was really busy doing other stuff and I went down and play with them-me and him and James. That's three of us. James was playing bass, I was playing guitar and Lars was playing drums and we rehearse that "Hit The Lights" song, but way before that Lars had let me hear that song. We were hanging out watching soccer and he says "hey I met this guy blah blah blah and he's exactly what we want to jam with and he played this one song and it was great and that's how I was first was introduced to "Hit The Lights." After that I went over and jam a few times and he called me and say they gonna be in this compilation album and he brought over a tape of "Hit The Lights" recording on a four track asked me to play some solo for that and they were going to bring the four track down and they were going to bring it down and dump it on the compilation album." Metal Massacre I was released on June 14, 1982. The early pressings listed the band incorrectly as "Mettallica," pissing the band off. However, the song "Hit The Lights," generated a buzz, and Metallica played their first live performance on March 14, 1982, at Radio City in Anaheim, California. The lineup consisted of James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Dave Mustaine, and newly recruited bassist Ron McGovney, who had been in James' previous band, "Leather Charm." Their first live success happened as they were chosen to open for British heavy metal band Saxon at one gig of their 1982 U.S. tour. This show was Metallica's second gig. In addition, Metallica recorded its first demo, Power Metal, whose name was inspired by Quintana's early business cards in early 1982. In late 1982, Ulrich and Hetfield attended a show at the West Hollywood nightclub Whisky a Go Go, which featured bassist Cliff Burton in the band Trauma. Clifford Lee Burton was born on February 10, 1962, in Castro Valley, California, to Ray and Jan Burton. Cliff's interest in music began when his father introduced him to classical music, and he began taking piano lessons. In his teenage years, he developed an interest in Rock, classical, country, and heavy metal. He began playing the bass at 13, after the death of his brother. His parents quoted him as saying, "I'm going to be the best bassist for my brother." He practiced up to six hours daily (even after joining Metallica). Besides classical and jazz, Burton's other early influences varied from Southern Rock and country to the blues. Cliff has cited Geddy Lee, Geezer Butler, Stanley Clarke, Lemmy Kilmister, and Phil Lynott as significant influences on his style of bass playing. James and Lars were "blown away" by Cliff's use of a wah-wah pedal and asked him to join Metallica. The two leaders wanted Ron McGovney to leave because they thought he "didn't contribute anything, he just followed." According to McGovney, his time in Metallica was reportedly tumultuous, as he often clashed with Ulrich and Mustaine. In addition, he felt that, aside from using the connections he made as an amateur photographer, his role was that of a money man and transportation provider rather than a respected band member. He ultimately quit on December 10, 1982, due to growing tensions. After leaving Metallica, McGovney became uninterested in playing music and sold most of his equipment. Although Cliff Burton initially declined the offer to join Metallica, by the end of the year, he had accepted on the condition that the band moves to El Cerrito in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Metallica's first live performance with Cliff was at the nightclub "The Stone" in March 1983, and the first recording to feature Burton was the Megaforce demo (1983). Metallica was ready to record their debut album, but they began looking for other options when Metal Blade could not cover the cost. Concert promoter Jonathan "Jonny Z" Zazula, who had heard the demo No Life 'til Leather (1982), offered to broker a record deal between Metallica and New York City-based record labels. After those record labels showed no interest, Zazula borrowed enough money to cover the recording budget and signed Metallica to his label, Megaforce Records. In May 1983, Metallica traveled to Rochester, New York, to record its debut album, Metal Up Your Ass, which Paul Curcio produced. Unfortunately, the other members of Metallica decided to eject Mustaine from the band because of his drug and alcohol abuse and violent behavior just before the recording sessions on April 11, 1983. About this time, Mustaine told Loudwire magazine: "When you're around a lot of people that like to drink and get silly, they just want to have fun," Mustaine explains. "I would drink and have fun until someone would refute something I had said. And then that was war, baby. I'd be aggressive and confrontational because I was a violent drunk. I lost all inhibitions when I was drinking, and that didn't go over to well in the end." The end came on April 11, 1983, and it came without warning for Mustaine. Metallica had already hired Kirk Hammett as their new lead guitarist. At around 9AM that morning, James, Lars, and Cliff woke up Mustaine, suffering from a tremendous hangover, and told him he was out of the band. "The thing that really upset me was that they never gave me a warning and I never got a second chance," Mustaine says. "It was just, 'Hey man. You're out. See ya later." When Mustaine asked when his flight back to California was, he was told he wasn't flying. He was taking a four-day bus ride. Even worse, the bus was scheduled to leave one hour after he was fired. Mustaine scrambled to pack a travel bag, and James drove him from the Music Building in Queens to 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. During the seemingly endless bus ride, according to Livewire.com, he was rightfully pissed for a while and then decided to write some new lyrics. Since he didn't have any paper, he wrote on the back of a handbill from Senator Alan Cranston. A message on the front of the card referred to the stockpiling of nuclear weapons that read, "The arsenal of megadeath can't be rid." After considerable thought, Mustaine decided the term megadeath would make a cool name for a metal band, especially if it were misspelled as Megadeth. Kirk Lee Hammett was born on November 18, 1962, in San Francisco, California, and raised in the town of El Sobrante. He is the son of Teofila "Chefela" and Dennis L. Hammett, a Merchant Mariner. While attending De Anza High School, he met Les Claypool of Primus, and they remain close friends. Kirk began showing an interest in music after listening to his brother Rick's extensive record collection (which included Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and UFO). In addition, he was a huge horror movie fan but began selling his horror magazines to buy albums. This infatuation led him to pick up the guitar at fifteen. His first guitar was (in his own words) a "wholly unglamorous" Montgomery Ward catalog special that came with a shoebox with a 4-inch speaker for an amp. After purchasing a 1978 Fender Strat copy, Kirk attempted to customize his sound with various guitar parts before eventually buying a 1974 Gibson Flying V. Guitarist Kirk Hammett replaced Dave Mustaine the same afternoon. Metallica's first live performance with Kirk was on April 16, 1983, at a nightclub in Dover, New Jersey, called "The Showplace." Mustaine has expressed his dislike for Kirk in interviews, saying he "stole" his job. Mustaine was "pissed off" because he believed Hammett became popular by playing guitar leads that Mustaine had written. In a 1985 interview with Metal Forces, Mustaine said, "it's real funny how Kirk Hammett ripped off every lead break I'd played on that No Life 'til Leather tape and got voted No. 1 guitarist in your magazine". Because of conflicts with its record label and the distributors' refusal to release an album titled Metal Up Your Ass, the album was renamed "Kill' Em All." It was released on Megaforce Records in the U.S. and on Music for Nations in Europe and peaked at number 155 on the Billboard 200 in 1986. Pretty cool, considering their top ten that year was: 1. That's What Friends Are For - Dionne Warwick, Elton John, and Gladys Knight 2. Say You, Say Me - Lionel Richie 3. I Miss You - Klymaxx 4. On My Own - Patti Labelle and Michael McDonald 5. Broken Wings - Mr. Mister 6. How Will I Know - Whitney Houston 7. Party All the Time - Eddie Murphy 8. Burning Heart - Survivor 9. Kyrie - Mr. Mister 10. Addicted to Love - Robert Palmer Although the album was not initially a financial success, it earned Metallica a growing fan base in the underground metal scene. The band embarked on the "Kill' Em All for One" tour with Raven to support the release. In February 1984, Metallica supported Venom on the "Seven Dates of Hell" tour, during which the bands performed in front of 7,000 people at the Aardschok Festival in Zwolle, Netherlands. Metallica recorded the album in only two weeks on a shoestring budget. Initially, the band printed 1,500 copies. Since its release, "Kill 'Em All" has been certified 3x platinum. Metallica then recorded their second studio album, Ride the Lightning, at Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen, Denmark, from February to March 1984. It was released in August 1984 and reached number 100 on the Billboard 200. Unfortunately, a French printing press mistakenly printed green covers for the album, which are now considered collectors' items. Mustaine received writing credit for "Ride the Lightning" and "The Call of Ktulu." Elektra Records A&R director Michael Alago, and co-founder of Q-Prime Management Cliff Burnstein, attended a Metallica concert in September 1984. They were impressed with their performance and signed Metallica to Elektra. They also made them a Q-Prime Management artist. Metallica's growing success was such that the band's British label Music for Nations released "Creeping Death" as a limited-edition single, which sold 40,000 copies as an import in the U.S. Two of the three songs on the record—cover versions of Diamond Head's "Am I Evil?" and Blitzkrieg's "Blitzkrieg"—appeared on the 1988 Elektra reissue of "Kill' Em All." With unforgettable songs like "For Whom The Bell Tolls," "Creeping Death," and "Fade To Black", "Ride The Lightning" has sold over 5 million copies in the U.S. and has been certified 5x Platinum by the RIAA. That bell in the beginning of "For Whom The Bell Tolls", isn't really a bell at all. As producer Flemming Rasmussen recalled: “We had an anvil in the studio, and Lars had to bang that; it could've been that or from a record of sound effects. But there was a really heavy, cast-iron anvil and a metal hammer, and we stuck them in an all-concrete room. He'd just go wang.” If you've ever tried to play along with the studio album version of "For Whom, The Bell Tolls, " you've probably had some guitar tuning issues. That's because the song is a quarter step above standard tuning. Why? As the Metallica Wiki says, there are two theories. The first is that the band intentionally sped up the recording, pitch shifting it in the process. The second is that the guitars are tuned up a quarter step to match the pitch of the "tolling bells." I mean anvil... now that's "metal AF". Metallica embarked on its first major European tour with Tank to an average crowd of 1,300. Returning to the U.S., it embarked upon a tour co-headlining with W.A.S.P. and supported by Armored Saint, featuring John Bush on vocals, who later went on to front Anthrax. Metallica played its largest show at the Monsters of Rock fest at Donington Park, England, on August 17, 1985, with Bon Jovi and Ratt, playing to 70,000 people. Then, at the "Day on the Green" festival in Oakland, California, the band played to a crowd of 60,000. Metallica's third studio album, Master of Puppets, was recorded at Sweet Silence Studios in Denmark from September to December 1985 and was released in March 1986. The album reached number 29 on the Billboard 200 and spent 72 weeks on the chart. It was the band's first album to be certified gold on November 4, 1986 and has sold over 6 million copies. In 2015, Master of Puppets became the first ever metal album in history to be selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry. Following the album's release, Metallica supported Ozzy Osbourne on a U.S. tour. During this time, James Hetfield broke his wrist while skateboarding; he continued with the tour, performing vocals, with guitar technician John Marshall playing rhythm guitar. On the night of Sept. 26, 1986, Metallica was traveling between tour dates in Sweden when Burton and guitarist Kirk Hammett drew cards to decide who would get to choose a bunk. The bassist drew the Ace of Spades and chose the bunk Hammett had been occupying. "I said fine, take my bunk," the guitarist recalled in VH1's Behind the Music. "I'll sleep up front; it's probably better anyway." In the early morning of Sept. 27, 1986, shortly before 7 AM, the band members were awakened abruptly when the bus began to sway from side to side. The driver later told authorities that he lost control of the bus after hitting a patch of black ice. The bus left the road and flipped over on its side, and Cliff Burton – asleep in the top bunk – was thrown through the window. As the bus came down, it landed on top of him. He was only 24 years old. Reportedly, attempts were made to rescue him from underneath the bus by lifting it with a crane, but the crane slipped, and the bus crashed down on top of Burton a second time. Band members and onlookers have given different accounts of whether Burton died upon the first impact or when the bus came down again. Whichever way it happened, Cliff Burton died at the scene. Hetfield said: "I saw the bus lying right on him. I saw his legs sticking out. I freaked. The bus driver, I recall, was trying to yank the blanket out from under him to use for other people. I just went, 'Don't fucking do that!' I already wanted to kill the bus driver. I don't know if he was drunk or if he hit some ice. All I knew was, he was driving and Cliff wasn't alive anymore." James has said he walked up and down the road in his socks and underwear looking for black ice and found none. The band has speculated over the years if drinking or drugs could have played a role in the accident or if the driver fell asleep at the wheel. An investigation cleared the driver of any wrongdoing. Burton was cremated, and his ashes were scattered at the Maxwell Ranch in California. Metallica's "Orion" was played at the ceremony, and lyrics from "To Live Is to Die" are engraved upon his memorial stone: "Cannot the Kingdom of Salvation take me home." In an interview with Gibson TV, Kirk Hammet, who could have been the one in that unlucky bunk said: "The last show that we played with Cliff was a spectacular show," Kirk recalls in the interview. "It was the first show after maybe six or seven weeks when James was back on guitar because he had broken his arm during the Ozzy tour. His arms was healed enough so he was able to play guitar and it was the first show where we had James back… and it was the night that Cliff died. "Everyone was just so happy James was back and to have James's guitar fuelling everything again, rather than me and John Marshall [tech and stand-in guitarist] sharing that duty. We played really, really well and felt like we were back 100%… so that last show was one of the best shows we'd played all fucking year and in retrospect I'm glad Cliff's last show was special in that regard. It really was, in all respects, one of the best shows we'd played and Cliff was very, very happy. So knowing that is a good thing." "It' didn't really, truly sink in until about three weeks or so [afterwards]," Hammett remembers. "As a tribute to Cliff's memory it was important for us to go on [but for] those first two weeks it was up and down, we had no idea what we were going to do. I was taking guitar lessons, the old standby for musicians who can't find any gigs or band. That's what I was actually thinking."
With over 12K retail locations closing in 2020, leaving 159M square feet of retail space unoccupied, many might be thinking that the future of brick and mortar retail locations is permanently on the decline. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, retailers opened more stores than they closed in 2021, “with a nearly 40 percent increase in year-over-year store opening announcements” (AZ Big Media). Retail Refined host Melissa Gonzalez, spoke withBrent Paulsen, Managing Director and Head of Retail at UNTUCKit about the company's brick and mortar store strategy, the future of retail, and how data analytics can be utilized to drive decisions and increase profitability.Paulsen has spent 30 years working in retail store operations for multiple companies including Bloomingdales, Home Depot, Sears, Montgomery Ward, and Lord & Taylor. His breadth of experience in brick-and-mortar operations made him a perfect fit to join UNTUCKit in 2015 when the company was looking to expand its store presence. At the time, the company had two locations. Since joining the company, Paulsen has been part of the company's rapid growth leading to the addition of 86 stores in the U.S., Canada, and the UK as of June 2022.For those who are not familiar with the brand, UNTUCKit is casual apparel that is designed to be worn at work with the ability to successfully transition to life after the workday is done. “Our tag line, ‘Shirts Designed to be Worn Untucked,' is how we differentiate ourselves from other retailers… our job is to really get people into a product that fits them. A shirt that is designed to fit well that is not a custom product is our market niche,” said Paulson.In discussing the company's brick and mortar strategy, Paulson noted that “we are definitely believers that the role of a store is important to a brand. So UNTUCKit was initially a direct-to-consumer brand, DTC brand, we positioned our first store after opening a popup in New York in the Fall of 2015. The customer response to being able to see and feel and touch and try on our product was exceptional.”Online sales data helped determine where to open stores based on where the product was already selling well. This helped build credibility for the brand while increasing online and in-person sales. And it helps defray the costs of traditional advertising such as TV, radio, and social media – the cost of introducing a customer to the brand through a physical store can be very cost-effective compared to other advertising methods.
On this week's Make Believe Ballroom some War Bond tunes, Hudson-Delange history, Montgomery Ward records, a famous theme song, Lenny from Down the Block stories, a bizarre bandleader tale, more music and talk.
Anna Davlantes, WGN Radio's new investigative correspondent, joined Bob Sirott to share what happened this week in Chicago history. Stories include Montgomery Ward’s legal battle, the opening of Fannie May’s first retail shop, Wally Phillips’ Black Box, a toast to Harry Caray, and Michael Jordan’s most iconic interview.
Irving Naxon invented the Crock-Pot, originally called the Naxon Beanery, in the 1930s. He got the idea from his Orthodox Jewish mother who tossed ingredients in a pot to cook cholent overnight for Shabbat dinner. Cooking on Shabbat was forbidden, but this method allowed her to still serve a hot meal. The Crock-Pot was sold at big Chicago department stores like Sears and Montgomery Ward, and it was marketed as an efficient and inexpensive way to make dinner, especially for working mothers. We talk to Irving Naxon's daughter, Lenore, who has become the unofficial historian of the Crock-Pot. If you haven't yet, remember to vote for us as Best Podcast and Best Newsletter in the Chicago Reader's "Best of Chicago 2021" poll under the "City Life" category. Some Good News: Tomorrow Never Knows 2022 starts tonight! Find out more info and get tickets on their website. Follow us on Twitter: @CityCastChicago Sign up for our newsletter: chicago.citycast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The employees of the Montgomery Ward and Charm Co. are celebrating an office holiday party when an unthinkable act occurs! Can the heroes discover the traitor in their midst, or will the villain escape the clutch of justice? --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/campaignsoftheplains/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/campaignsoftheplains/support
The employees of the Montgomery Ward and Charm Co. are celebrating an office holiday party when an unthinkable act occurs! Can the heroes discover the traitor in their midst, or will the villain escape the clutch of justice? --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/campaignsoftheplains/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/campaignsoftheplains/support
It's the Wednesday after Christmas and before the new year, 2022, and Father Koys is back with us, seeing that this week is a gift between Christmas and New Year's allowing him to reflect on several topics to wrinkle your brains loyal listeners. First off, his shares with us the story of Bob May and his creation of the story of the most famous of Santa's reindeer: Rudolph and how when it was first written, Montgomery Ward distributed the book and Father Koys says it's more of an act of corporate goodness, rather than greed. He also reflects on recent readings and Covid-19 information and facts, again regarding the vaccines. https://ststanschurch.org/
As the Christmas season of 1938 came to Chicago, Illinois, Bob May was not feeling much in the holiday spirit and for good reason. The 34-year old father of one, who penned ads for retail giant Montgomery Ward, was exhausted and nearly broke. Worse yet, his wife, Evelyn, was bedridden and fighting valiantly against a cancer that had already stolen 2-years of her young life. One night, Bob's daughter, Barbara, asked her father: “Why isn't my mommy like everybody else's mommy?” This devastated Bob May and as he struggled to answer her heart-wrenching question, he turned to his own personal experience of growing up and decided to spin a tail for Barbara that would help ease her pain and explain their family's hardships. Little did he know, that his tale would transform the story of Christmas forever and come to entertain the world over. Thank you for joining us on this very special, very blessed Christmas Day. Gather the family together, give thanks, and enjoy an episode of The Missing Chapter Podcast that will explain the origins of one of our most time-honored stories. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/themissingchapter/support
It's a holly jolly episode of Doom Generation. Christmas is here (If you survived the night)! Jerry Goldsmith is redeemed, we put some respect on Michael Winslow's name, DG goes ACAB, Montgomery Ward memories, mass hysteria, the reason Nicole's husband's parents made him leave the room, mass hysteria, the cuteness that outweighs the trauma, and MORE on this episode! HO HO HO! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/doomgeneration/message
Merry Christmas Eve! By gum we're going to do at least one holiday book this month, if it kills us. Heck, for that matter, why not go local? You see, Kate and Betsy both live in Evanston, Illinois and it just so happens that one of the most famous Christmas songs out there started its life as a children's book by an Evanston author! Yes indeed, we doing a deep dive into Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer today circa 1939. And not just any book, but a reprint of the original story (pre-song and pre-television adaptation) that was handed out for free in department stores all those years ago. How does it hold up to modern scrutiny? Only one way to find out: Show Notes: Kate would like to correct her earlier statement that this scene is set in Chicago (though Chicago is mentioned). That said, here's the scene she refers to, early on in our show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxtLxqBolJI FURTHER CORRECTION: At one point in the podcast Betsy says that Robert L. May wrote the book for Marshall Fields. She then almost immediately says it was Montgomery Ward. The correct department story was, in fact, Montgomery Ward. Here's an NPR piece on the behind-the-scenes tale of Rudolph: https://www.npr.org/2013/12/25/256579598/writing-rudolph-the-original-red-nosed-manuscript We find it interesting that Rudolph began his life as a department store's character and this year Macy's is doing the same dang thing! https://youtu.be/DwIUIrk56cQ Betsy Recommends: The New Vic production of Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas in New York City!: https://newvictory.org/tickets-and-events/2122-live-performance-emmet-otters-jugband-christmas/ Kate Recommends: This link to the article about ostrich cells used to make COVID detection: masks: https://tanksgoodnews.com/japanese-scientists-use-ostrich-cells-to-make-glowing-covid-19-detection-masks/ And this Etsy artist that makes ostrich ornaments: https://www.etsy.com/shop/AnimalsThatGoPlaces?ref=simple-shop-header-name&listing_id=180973083 And these socks: https://outofprint.com/products/the-monster-at-the-end-of-this-book-socks For the full Show Notes please visit: https://blogs.slj.com/afuse8production/2021/12/24/fuse-8-n-kate-rudolph-the-red-nosed-reindeer-by-robert-l-may-ill-denver-gillen/
We’re dropping one final episode before the holidays! Join us for a discussion of The Conners episode “Yard Sale, Phone Fail, And a College Betrayal” in which Dan finds it hard to part with his and Roseanne’s old bedroom set from Montgomery Ward. We saw fit to pair this with a hidden gem from Roseanne … Continue reading S4 E7: Holiday Tidings & Heavy Furniture
When John Lord, a former head of a child-safety-seat manufacturer, started in the cannabis industry, he was viewed with suspicion by legacy operators because he was an outsider. But the CEO of Denver-based LivWell Enlightened Health quickly became a believer in the product. Cannabis was unlike any other product John had sold, but he realized that to successfully sell it, he still needed standard business practices. In this season finale of Seed to CEO, Lord dishes on the early days of building a cannabis company as well as: How technology and standard operating procedures can vastly improve your operations. Why looking beyond today's ecosystem is critical for long-term growth. How changing regulations set the stage for LivWell's acquisition strategy. Why now was the right time for LivWell to be the acquired rather than the acquirer. Who is John Lord? John Lord is the CEO of LivWell, a vertically integrated cannabis company operating in Colorado and Michigan. LivWell was acquired by Chicago-based multistate operator PharmaCann in October. New Zealand “born and raised,” John started in dairy farming before building one of the most successful child products companies in the world, selling in major retailers such as Walmart, Toys R Us and Montgomery Ward. John sold that company and retired at 49, but boredom quickly set in and the cannabis industry was just getting started. So he unretired to launch the company that would become LivWell.
Julie and Dipa talk about stories from their Christmas past and challenge each other with some Christmas trivia.
When John Lord, a former head of a child-safety-seat manufacturer, started in the cannabis industry, he was viewed with suspicion by legacy operators because he was an outsider. But the CEO of Denver-based LivWell Enlightened Health quickly became a believer in the product. Cannabis was unlike any other product John had sold, but he realized that to successfully sell it, he still needed standard business practices. In this season finale of Seed to CEO, Lord dishes on the early days of building a cannabis company as well as: How technology and standard operating procedures can vastly improve your operations. Why looking beyond today's ecosystem is critical for long-term growth. How changing regulations set the stage for LivWell's acquisition strategy. Why now was the right time for LivWell to be the acquired rather than the acquirer. Who is John Lord? John Lord is the CEO of LivWell, a vertically integrated cannabis company operating in Colorado and Michigan. LivWell was acquired by Chicago-based multistate operator PharmaCann in October. New Zealand “born and raised,” John started in dairy farming before building one of the most successful child products companies in the world, selling in major retailers such as Walmart, Toys R Us and Montgomery Ward. John sold that company and retired at 49, but boredom quickly set in and the cannabis industry was just getting started. So he unretired to launch the company that would become LivWell.
Brian talks about an attention grabbing ad he saw for Nehi Soda. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaWhr3WYoH8 Transcription A Christmas ad challenge. Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live. Let's talk about Christmas advertising, shall we? And I'm not just Christmas, but anything this time of year, any type of holiday-based thing. Obviously, Christmas is the big behemoth that you it's tough to ignore, depending on your audience, depending on what it is that you're selling. But in general, Christmas tends to be the main one. So I'm going by that. One thing when it comes to advertising, is you want to have something outrageous and crazy. So much of what we have, in terms of tradition, is some commercialized-based thing. I mean, Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer was a commercial for originally the original poem and the song and everything. This was a commercial for Montgomery Ward. Okay. So many of the songs we sang, were commissioned by companies to, to get advertising for themselves, that the labor lamp I have, not only was it for a movie, okay? It's a prop in a movie, the prop was based on a commercial for Nehi. The Nehi logo for Nehi soda. Thing after thing after thing you can see out there all the Christmas memes out there on the internet. A whole lot of them originate from companies trying to get attention. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's already there. You can't de commercialized Christmas, really, and still have it be the Christmas that most of us understand and know right now, I mean, you could, but it would be a different thing. It would not be what we currently what most Americans, I would say consider Christmas if you removed all of those pieces. So you can completely ignore Christmas, you can. But you got to realize that most people, the holidays are on their mind. And if you're going to enter the conversation in your customer's mind, which is the quickest way to be able to get to know them, to get your message out to them. Then you have to acknowledge when holidays exist, regardless of what time of year it is, there's always some type of holiday present. If there isn't, you can point to other holidays that most people don't know exist and get the attention that way. But we've discussed that previously, many times before the challenge of the Christmas ad is to do something that's remarkable. That's worth remarking over, that's worth talking about that people will pass on to other people. If you can do that, if you can have any form of advertisement that acknowledges what's going on, and is something that people are going to pay attention to. Now you got something if you have something that can be gifted, now you got something, you just have to think about what is this person thinking about? What is your ideal customer thinking about right now? Chances are, it's not your product or service. So how do you take what they're thinking about and reroute it back to your product or service in order to make their season brighter and make yours brighter by selling your product or service? Hopefully, that's helpful to you. I've got a book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. It's all about strategies on how you can really make that relationship with the customer stronger to the point to where you no longer have competition, even if it's amazon.com. You can read all about this for free and if you go download the book at AmazonProofBook.com. That's all I got for tonight. Season's greetings and we'll see you tomorrow night. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.
A Very Merry Movie Club Christmas takes a look at Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer! "A misfit reindeer and his friends look for a place that will accept them." Jeff & Donald talk Rankin Bass, Montgomery Ward, Moonrazer and more! Interact with the show on Discord: discord.gg/e7724unQPs Follow us on Twitter: @coyknutspodcast
No início do século XX, grandes empresas — como Sears, Montgomery Ward e Aladdin — tinham a mania de vender casas por catálogo e entregá-las por correio nos Estados Unidos. Este assunto foi abordado no episódio 323 do podcast americano 99% Invisible, e nós achamos tão interessante que resolvemos fazer uma adaptação desse trabalho para nossos ouvintes. Além disso, também batemos um papo sobre alguns outros catálogos impressionantes do século passado. 00:30 — Remix: A Casa que Veio pelo Correio 22:50 — Conversas Sobre Catálogos LINKS 99% Invisible: The House that Came in the Mail; Sears Catalog House or Something Like It (Hopewell, VA) — Sears Modern Homes; Catálogo da Sears & Roebuck de 1908 — archive.org; Sweet's architectural catalogue — archive.org; Construction & Building Materials Directory | Suppliers — Sweets; Whole Earth Catalog — wikipedia.org; Whole Earth Catalog, Outono de 1968 — monoskop.org; MÚSICAS The Housemartins — Build Playlist no Spotify NA INTERNET foradeprumo.com Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube. REDES SOCIAIS Arthur, Gabriel, Natália. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/fora-de-prumo/message
Life can be jam-packed full of second chances. Sometimes we have to orchestrate our own melodies, and occasionally, the day plays an unplanned piece so sweet we're not even sure if we are supposed to hear it. Welcome the tragic tunes and the victorious versus all the same because seasons are short, so we'd better listen close while we can. "Chris, I told you the car needs work, and it's not safe enough for you to drive. It died on me three times on the way to Montgomery Ward," Mom said for the final time, again. "Mom, I need to borrow it today; it'll be fine. If it dies on me, I'll just restart it," I begged. She countered with, "It's not going to happen, and if you keep asking, I'll never let you borrow it again. "Mom, please! You don't understand. I wouldn't ask if it wasn't important." "Leave me alone, Christopher! Maybe you can use your brother's car. He'll leave it with me today, so I'll have something to drive until mine gets fixed. I'll ask him before you get home." Well, that never dawned on me at all. My brother, Larry, loves his ride. There's no way he's going to let me use it after school today. It's a sweet, bright white 85' Cutlass that I've admired since the first day he showed it off. Kelly would flip out if I picked her up in it. I'm not even sure if I am worthy enough to sit in the driver's seat of something that special. She's deserving, though, and maybe I'll come home to some good news. Lucky me, this has to be the longest ride home ever. As soon as the bus was ready to leave MCHS, some kid in the back barfed, and it flowed as far as my seat before it stopped. He got to enjoy his fruit cocktail cup twice today, good for him. Who knows what the pink stuff is that the driver sprinkles on top. It smells almost as bad as the vomit. Between that and Todd's little brother asking me to join his birdwatching club, I've had about enough. I've had a little time to reflect on the day in between the excitement. It made me feel pretty spectacular when Kelly's best friend, Jennifer, told me that her homeslice was excited to see me after school. The nagging feeling of my brother possibly saying no has been eating at me since first period. Telling Kelly, we may have to cancel wasn't an option because I at least want to project the illusion that I have everything together. So much for being in control of my fate. All I can do now is pray that things work out in my favor. The giant yellow bus swings around our barn to reveal the stunning automobile I desperately hope to pilot. Everything feels like slow motion as I make my exit and walk toward the impeccable machine resting in front of our house. Gently placing my hand on the trunk, I let my fingers glide over the paint as I circle to the hood. Peering through the windshield, I imagine myself in control of this masterpiece. "Chris!" blares through the screen door and snaps me from my daze. My stomach feels sick as I march toward the front entrance into the unknown. The smell of the pink stuff still lingers in my nostrils, and that isn't helping at all. One of two things is about to happen; I'll call my friend to cancel our encounter, or I'll pull up in her driveway in Larry's brilliant white beauty. Why do I feel like my life is over? Tracy Chapman's, Fast Car plays on the radio, drowning any outside noise leaving me solely with my thoughts. The steering wheel of my brother's 1985 Cutlass feels right at home in my hands as I cruise down Salem road. If my smile were any bigger, it would have to sit in the backseat to make room for Kelly. Man, this day has certainly turned around, and I will not let it go to waste. My actual assignment isn't writing the play at all; it's asking her out on a date. My confidence level is through the roof, so this should be a cakewalk. "Oh boy, I just want to turn around and go home," I said to myself as my spirit took a nose dive turning into her driveway. She's probably going to say no, so I should save face and treat her like she's Miller or something. I'll picture his head on her shoulders and maybe survive the whole trip without sounding like an idiot. Kelly comes strutting out and jumps in the front seat before I get the chance to walk to her door. "Too bad Miller can't be here, huh?" Kelly expressed. "Miller? Who?" I mumbled as the reality of her sitting in my front seat smacked me in the face like that softball the time the sun got in my eyes. "Yeah, it's um too bad he couldn't tag along," is all I could think to say after hearing her sweet voice glide along through the air. The scent of her perfume overtook any leftover odor from the pink stuff and sent my senses into a fabulous frenzy of joy. "Chris!" "Yeah!?" I shook my head and blurted as if someone rubbed smelling salt on my nose. "We should probably leave before it's time to be back, don't ya think?" I wholeheartedly agreed, put the car in reverse, and pulled out into the road. Maybe it's a self-esteem issue, but I never once pictured myself in a situation like this. A guy can spend his entire life thinking and dreaming of this very moment, but it always seems so out of reach. Well, until it finally happens. We're talking and joking like we do every day in speech and drama class in no time at all. It feels right. "I love this car. Who's is it?" "It's my brothers. I can't believe he let me borrow it." The one I drove yesterday finally gave out, and I'm glad it did because this is an improvement." "I'd say so. It's nice, but the adventure was fun yesterday, not knowing if we'd stall in the middle of traffic. You kept me guessing for sure." "Welp, I'm known all over Tennessee as an adventuresome man of mystery, you know," escapes my lips as I push up my glasses while realizing how lame that sounded. "That was lame," Kelly snickers. We go through the trouble of renting the library conference room at APSU for the second night and have a seat directly across from each other. Kelly asks where we should start, and I tell her that I have a confession to make. Honesty is always the best policy, and she should hear the truth. "What is it, Chris? You're not an adventuresome man of mystery?" "No, that's true, but there's something else, Kelly." Pulling out my folder, I place a finished script in front of her. "I stayed up late last night completing this so we could just hang out today. Being around you is remarkable, and I never feel like we have enough time, so I wanted to make some for us. Look, if this sounds creepy, I get it, so I don't blame you if you want me to take you home. I lied about only being available today because I wanted to be alone with you. I figured Miller would be okay with it, so yeah, that's everything," Exhaling, I wait on her reply. "I know." "You know? You know what?" "Monday, you told me your schedule for the week, and I know you don't have to be at work until Saturday. I went along with it because I was hoping we could hang out together without any interruptions. I think you're sweet." "Will you go on a date with me Friday?" Wow! did I just say that out loud! She's going to say no. I've pushed my luck way too far, and it'll be over before it starts. I can feel it." "I would, Chris, but Miller asked me already at school today. "Oh." "I'm kidding; I'd love to go out with you. We don't even have to bring Miller along." I fought the urge to tell her that I fell for her over a year ago. Who knows if it's love or not. I guess I'm not even sure what that means. It's best to let some things slip through the cracks of history. One shot at this may be all I have, so I'm sure not going to turn it into some complex mess. The only thing I'm one hundred percent positive of is that she said yes, so I'll enjoy that for now. Kelly and I spent the rest of the evening discussing how complicated life can be and how uncertain the future is at our age. All of our differences surfaced along with anything we had in common. It's probably the most I'll ever learn in a library. Her laughter and the look in her eyes when she tells her own funny story will surely stick with me forever. When I dropped her off at her house that evening, we walked to her front door together. Our first kiss taunted the both of us, but we settled for a hug knowing Friday wasn't far away.
Down Home Cajun Music- Riverside RamblersThe Riverside Ramblers were actually the Hackberry Ramblers recording by a different name. By 1936, the band was broadcasting from the Montgomery Ward store in Lake Charles and the station held a contest as to what to name the group. The store's most popular tire was the "Riverside" and some listener won with the suggestion of Riverside Ramblers. Under this name the group scored a country hit with “Wondering,”. From 1937 to 1938 The Riverside Ramblers recorded a mixed variety of originals and cover songs. These recordings revealed Luderin Darbone, with his lilting, lyrical fiddle style, as a leading creative figure of his day whose contributions have come to be considered historic.Dissatisfied (Bluebird 6926)Wondering (Bluebird 6926)Drifting Along (Bluebird 7063)The Old Fiddle Blues (Bluebird 7251)Ain't Satisfied (Bluebird 7202)Ain't Gonna Give You None (Bluebird 7202)Little Acadian Girl (Bluebird 7846)Let's Go Fishing (Bluebird 7942)Right Or Wrong (Bluebird 8000)One Sweet Letter (Bluebird 8000)The Lonesome Wanderer (MW 7342)*All Selections from the original 78 rpm records.
It's almost a little cruel going from the top of the food chain as a sixth-grader into a school occupied by grades seventh through twelfth. Montgomery Central is a giant swimming pool occupied by hormone-driven adolescents pushed in with the option to sink or swim. Some students look like they could still be breastfeeding, while others have full-on Grizzly Adams beards. Seventh grade was a blur trying to find my way around and making new friends. Somehow I survived, and I can only hope eighth grade will be more manageable. The first bus ride of the year is always a little exciting. I get to see all of my old friends, and it's fun meeting the kids who are new to the neighborhood. This particular year started right up with the hope of romance in my future. The driver took us down an unfamiliar road and stopped at a house I'd never seen before. It was the first time I made eye contact with Carol. She walked up the steps, and before sitting across the aisle from me, she smiled. "Wait, did she grin at me? She probably saw the sleeping drooly-faced kid next to me and thought it was funny. Gosh, he's going to cramp my style. Maybe she did smile at me," I thought while frantically trying to avoid eye contact for the remainder of the journey. The whole scenario played out the same for two full months. Carol would get on the bus, we'd both smile, and then I'd ignore her because I panicked and had no idea of how to seize the day. I should have never stopped reading comics because that's when all of my girl problems started. Graduating to stuff like "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may" has me constantly thinking about love and time. Time is on my side right now, but it'll be lost one day soon, and what if I never love? All adults ever do, is complain about how hard life can be and how lucky fourteen-year-olds like myself have it. Did they forget what it's like to be afraid and how paralyzing situations can be, or is it all a giant lie they tell kids to prepare us for adulthood? Maybe I'll figure that out one day. "Gosh, it's getting cold," escapes my mouth to be carried away by the frozen air for a moment before mixing with the heavy fog of a November morning. My footprints take the place of our first frost of the season while I hop to stay warm at the bus stop. Today is the day. I'm planning on asking Carol on a date. My brother already told me he'd be our chauffeur if I ever worked up enough nerve, so that's covered. We'll strike up a deep conversation, and before arriving at MCHS, I will have secured my very first date. Carol's stop came and went, and she didn't get on as luck would have it. Today was supposed to be my time to shine, so hopefully, I'll have enough nerve when I see her again. My heart was a little broken because I didn't get to sit across from her. We never spoke, but I'd gotten used to being near my brown-eyed companion. The empty seat is a reminder that I must act soon. Janet, Carol's good friend, stopped me on the way to first-period PE to talk. She informed me that Carol likes me and would like to be my girlfriend if I'd ever ask. After exiting the conversation, I was more worried than ever. What if she is only caught up in the idea of being my girlfriend? She hardly knows me, after all. Our first conversation could quite possibly be our last if I say the wrong thing. Those rosebuds are already beginning to wilt. After getting dressed for gym class, I got lost in conversation with my buddies, Brian and Wade, before roll call. "Did someone fart?" I inquired while my two pals wondered the same thing. Billy turned around to assure us no one farted this time, and it was actually Wayne. He'd spent the morning cleaning out the chicken coops before school, and a few souvenirs hitchhiked on the bottom of his sneakers. We were all thankful it wasn't us and changed the topic. My friends encouraged me to ask Carol out finally because they were probably tired of me talking about it. Caught up in our discussion, I'd missed my name, and Coach Cron gave me twenty push-ups. Wayne was on the bottom row of the bleachers, so I made sure to distance myself before the workout. The smell of a gymnasium is terrible enough without subtle hints of chicken poop swirling around my nostrils as I take deep breaths. Later in the day, I noticed Carol in the hallway. "Carpe diem," I thought over and over as I approached her with shaky knees and an accelerated heartbeat. After greeting one another, I asked her why she wasn't on the school bus. Before she could finish her explanation, I blurted out, "Would you like to go on a date?" Her flawless smile chased away the brief pause with welcomed relief before the bell signaled our tardiness. Being late to my sixth period didn't phase me in the least. We held hands on the way to the bus that afternoon after class. My birthday was back in July, and somehow I managed to save most of the cash for a special occasion. A first date qualifies, so I went all out and spared no expense. During our weekly trip to Montgomery Ward, I found a great deal on a necklace in the jewelry section. After dropping half of my money on it, the other half was for the movies. We both love to laugh, so we decided on Spies Like Us with Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd. We arrived at my date's house; I hopped from the car and rushed up the sidewalk to the front door. Knock, knock, knock. Carol's mother answered and invited me inside to have a seat. She told me her daughter would only be a minute and was super friendly. All I could think about while I sat on the couch was how excited I was about the big night. I imagined how thrilled she'd be after I gave her the gift and how we'd get to hold hands during the entire movie. Maybe I'd even be able to swing my first kiss at the end of our evening. Carol walked into the room, and I couldn't help but believe she was way out of my league. The ride to the theater lasted forever. There was so much to say but not while my big brother was in the front seat driving. The experience was awkward enough without him becoming part of the conversation. He drove off as we walked to the box office and paid for the two tickets. We had a few minutes before the show started, so I suggested we take a stroll. A few flurries began to fall, and I figured it would be romantic if I presented her gift before we went inside. The half-moon was peeking at us through the clouds, and everything could not have been more sublime. We stopped under a street lamp long enough for me to reach into my pocket to pull out her surprise. "Chris, this is beautiful," she told me before wrapping her arms around my neck to give me a tight squeeze. That embrace was worth every dime I spent earlier at the store for my new girlfriend. She asked me to put it on her, and I was successful after fumbling around for a minute or so. It was off to the concession stand for a couple of sodas before the movie. I couldn't tell you anything about the comedy except that it was rather magical sitting beside a pretty girl with her hand in mine. Occasionally we'd glance at each other and giggle. Sometimes I'd give her a tiny squeeze, and she'd return the favor. My fingers had fallen asleep about halfway in, but I wasn't about to waste a second neglecting her touch. This moment took two months to materialize, and every ounce of it would secure a spot in my heart forever. We whispered and laughed all the way back to her house after leaving the cinema. The only time Carol took her head off my shoulder was to briefly admire her new necklace. Soon I would be face to face with her at the front door. Hopefully, we would end with the kiss that's been in the making for fourteen years. Nervousness began to rear its ugly face, but I was confident enough to seize the day. It's too bad the climax would also indicate the end of our enchanting evening under the moonlight. Not a single word broke through the silence as I escorted her toward the house. All I wanted was a peck on the cheek, and I'd drown in complete fulfillment. Tonight everything will change, and I will officially be on my way to adulthood. We stopped at the front door, and she thanked me for a fantastic time. Her mesmerizing copper eyes drew me in like a tractor beam straight out of Star Wars. My heart was screaming through my chest the closer I got to her lips. Just before we connected and ultimately sealed the deal, she asked me to wait. "I don't like to French kiss," she uttered before I pulled away. Alright, I had no clue what a French kiss was, and I was not about to ruin everything, so I settled for another hug and told her goodbye. Carol and I held hands at school for a couple of more weeks before going our separate ways. Things didn't work out how I wanted them to, but my first date was in the books, and I officially had a girlfriend for a little while. My first kiss came along just before my sixteenth birthday with a girl named Jeannie, unless we count Teresa. I know it's confusing, but I'll explain that another day. "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying;And this same flower that smiles today Tomorrow will be dying." - Robert Herrick
Once a week, Mom drags me along for a trip into town. The usual stops are Montgomery Ward, Hilltop Market, and either Bonanza or Captain D's. She clips coupons for both places, and we pick the best deal. I end up eating for free almost every time. I don't mind going unless she has a doctor's appointment because those waiting rooms are dull, especially for a kid who wants to run around outside. The best part of our weekly supply run is when she lets me choose a couple of comics. Spider-Man, Captain America, and Batman are my all-time favorites and in that order. She doesn't mind purchasing them for me as long as I'm reading something. I noticed some Sea Monkeys in the toy section on one of our excursions and pleaded with my mother. It wasn't easy, but I convinced her to buy them after explaining how rare these animals are. They'd first come to my attention in the back of a Tarzan comic, and I was captivated by the picture of the underwater family hanging out by the castle. Now that I've dumped the packet into the aquarium, it's a matter of time before I introduce myself to the cute creatures. Each day after returning from Cumberland Heights Elementary school, I check on my miniature friends. I'd learned about a week in that they weren't going to look anything like the picture. Regardless their lives rested in my hands, and I was not about to let them down. The food ran out, so I had to get creative. The freshwater springs in the river bottom provided an all-you-can-eat algae buffet, so we are good to go. They're getting pretty large after several weeks, but I'm still waiting for them to hop in their aquatic automobiles and drive around the tiny town they'll eventually build. Most days, a Spidey comic stows away in my Trapper Keeper during school. Mrs. Allen doesn't like to see me reading them during class, and she's kept a close eye on me ever since I licked all of those erasers and stuck them to my face. It looked like I had some weird intergalactic chickenpox outbreak right out of Star Trek when I removed them. We paid a visit to Mr. Mitler, the principal, and he told her the circles on my forehead were punishment enough this time around. It probably wouldn't have been a big deal if most of the class hadn't copied me. At least no one made fun because they were all dealing with the same predicament. Most Friday's Mrs. Andrews, the PE teacher, lets us play battle ball the first half, and then we hit the playground afterward. It's the greatest game ever invented, without a doubt, and any wounds give the survivors bragging rights for a solid day or two. One time, I wound up, ready to release my wrath on Kent. He was like a sitting duck in my scope, and just before shots were fired, I was blindsided right in the face by James. PHOONTKK! The round rubber sphere smashes my mug in and shoots upward toward the gym ceiling. You could have heard a pin drop while the onlookers waited to see if I was still breathing. By the time the dodgeball fell back to earth, I had shown signs of life, and the game continued. I'd scheduled some light reading on the swingset for the second half of PE class. My copy of Amazing Spider-Man was rolled up in my back pocket, ready to be explored. The cover had a picture of one of my favorite supervillains, the Lizard. Some of the other kids gathered around to check out my literature of the day, and a conversation broke out. The slippery green creature reminded Kent of a story he'd heard about an alligator in the sewers of New York. With a sincere look, Kent said, "Yeah, somebody flushed the reptile down the toilet when it was a baby. Now it comes up through people's floors and eats them." Barney followed with, "It ate something radioactive and grew into a giant monster." And finally, James gave a little insight, "You won't catch me using the bathroom if I ever go to New York." A heated discussion evolved when Patricia and Kim walked by and told us we shouldn't believe everything we hear. James argued that girls were not experts on radioactive sewer creatures, so there was no need to take them seriously. While this made sense, I was skeptical because I figured the guys were getting me back for that last Cub Scout meeting at Kent's house. All of the guys were in the bathroom trying to summon the Bell Witch. Being the sneaky practical jokester that I am, I banged on the door and ran off. They screamed and made a speedy exit, almost breaking the doorway. They would have probably beaten me if my dad hadn't already arrived to pick me up. So I'm guessing Kent's accusations are his attempt at trying to frighten me. James and Barney are probably both in on it, so there is no way I'm falling for his tall tale of giant underground sewage-dwelling demons. The conversation switched gears as we moved to the monkey bars. Kiss was always the hot topic, and the true fans wore t-shirts emblazoned with the epic rock band at least once a week. You'd often find us standing around to see who had a tongue most like Gene Simmons. It got crazier than ever after Kiss Meets The Phantom Of The Park came out on television. Some guys dressed like their favorite band members for Halloween, but I usually stick with Spidey. After a long day of ball dodging and trying to stay on Mrs. Allens' good side, I was eager to get home to check on my Sea Monkeys. All of the time and effort were beginning to pay off. If you look close enough, you can see their miniature arms and legs swaying in the water. It's fun to spy on them as they swim to the top for a bite of food. I often wonder what they're thinking and if I'm disturbing the daily routine with my giant eavesdropping eyeballs. Busting through the front door, I plop my books down on the kitchen table and check the window seal for my aquarium. It's not there! Maybe I moved it to my bedroom and forgot? The cold truth punched me in the face as hard as that stupid ball James threw at me. "Mom, have you seen my Sea Monkeys?" I asked as she gave me 'the look.' "Yep, you left them in the kitchen, and they were stinking up the whole house," she confessed. "Where are they now?" I demanded. "I flushed them." "You WHAT!" "They had to go, Chris; I flushed them down the toilet." Pulling the comic from my back pocket, I throw it on the floor in front of her and say, "Look! Momma, you have no idea what you've done. We are all doomed." She sent me to my room.
A red-carpet movie premier coming to Western Mass and starring Western Mass and the former NFL player and Navy Seal who inspired Colin Kapernick to take a knee rather than to sit on the bench. A glimpse into the cranky psyche of early 20th Century Americans with complaint letters written to the mail order catalog Montgomery Ward. A last batch of winning words for Scrabble etc with the Word Nerd and more.
It's the 77th episode of the Truth About Vintage Amps Podcast, where amp tech Skip Simmons makes pizza on english muffins, crushes the dreams of young blues aficionados and fields your questions on all things tube amp. This week's episode is sponsored by Jupiter Condenser Co., Amplified Parts and Grez Guitars. Some of the topics discussed this week: :23 Skip has no electricity 3:52 Jason does a video shoot with David Grisman 4:17 The “Amigo SoCal” vintage guitar show (August 28-29, 2021); a Massey amp with reverb and tremolo 6:06 Alamo Paragon Special 8:01 Skip's tips: Vintage guitar show wheeling & dealing 10:23 Grez Guitars 12:10 Amplified Parts, ProCo guitar cords 12:57 Jupiter Caps: Bumblebees, Red Astrons, Cosmos caps 20:45 The TAVA Patreon page 25:17 The TAVA Index on Tableau!, Goldentone Amp book 28:51 Cleaning the crusty corrosion on a Fender silverface faceplate 31:34 Making a lower-power Vox clone? 35:21 Grid bias vs cathode bias on a pre-amp tube 38:50 Why does Skip have an oscilloscope and why doesn't he raise his prices? 41:14 Can you use a field coil speaker to drive speaker-driven reverb; voicecoils on a field coil speaker 45:07 Will the bigger vintage Fender amps ever go up in value? 49:32 Pinpointing note-triggered noise / rumble in an amp cabinet 52:55 A Lab Series L3 goes to a good home; Robert Moog; English muffin pizzas 55:12 What's up with the Fender Tremolux Model 6G9 with EL84 power tubes? Aspen Pittman's 'The Tube Amp' book (Amazon link) 58:15 A 1955 Montgomery Ward-branded amp with a wire from the speaker frame to the chassis 1:01:14 A one-way speaker mismatch on solid state amps? 1:02:54 Water kefir (recipe here) 1:04:30 Replacing the multi-cap can on a Fender Bassman 20 1:06:54 Using a pressure cooker for dried beans or potatoes 1:08:40 Poking a hole instead of solder wick 1:09:01 Vintage pencil sharpeners; Nelson Riddle 1:11:32 Any grads from the Red Wing Electronic Music Technology class? 1:12:32 The magic behind an early 1960s Ampeg M-15, vintage Jensen P15N speakers 1:15:30 What to do with a cheap Aerco-branded PA amp built by Atomite Electronic & Radio Corp? 1:21:35 Midwesterners: Skip is seeking Heileman's Special Export, Augsburger or Little Kings beer There is also a TAVA Big Index page located here. Co-hosted by the Fretboard Journal's Jason Verlinde. Email or send us a voice memo to: podcast@fretboardjournal.com or leave us a voicemail or text at 509-557-0848. And don't forget to share the show with friends.
Episode 32: I will be talking about Child World Toy Store, Best of Groucho, Montgomery Ward, and Willowbrook Ballroom and Banquets. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/pete-kastanes/message
Episode 32: I will be talking about Child World Toy Store, Best of Groucho, Montgomery Ward, and Willowbrook Ballroom and Banquets. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/pete-kastanes/message
Some Americans made double guns that could be had from Montgomery Ward for less than twenty dollars. And, then, there were Parkers and other American doubles that were elegant and expensive. And then, there was a Winchester double that you could use to "jack up the barn in the morning and then shoot ducks with it all afternoon. Is this a great country, or what?
Hello Interactors,So far this spring I’ve chronicled the spread of cadastral mapping across America. It was all part of Jefferson’s gridded agrarian vision. But by the middle of the 1800s immigrants started flooding in, the industrial age was taking hold, and cities were the thing to map.As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…THE PREACH AND THE LEECH "This lake was well named; it was but a scum of liquid mud, a foot or more deep, over which our boats were slid, not floated over, men wading each side without firm footing, but often sinking deep into this filthy mire, filled with bloodsuckers, which attached themselves in quantities to their legs. Three days were consumed in passing through this sinkhole of only one or two miles in length."Those are the words of Gurdon S. Hubbard, a fur trader from Vermont. In 1816, at age 18, he begged his parents to leave his job at a local hardware store to join a buddy on a fur trading expedition to Mackinac Island, Michigan. Two years later, in 1818, he found himself on a boat being drug through leech infested mud next the aptly named, Mud Lake – a terminating branch of the Des Plaines river. He was traversing a well known shortcut to Lake Michigan. As his men pulled blood sucking predatory leeches from their legs, he likely would have also been breathing in the odors of a pungent leek that grew along those shores. The Algonquin people called them Checagou. By the time Hubbard found this shortcut, it had already been named Chicago Portage and had been used for over one hundred years. In 1673, French Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette joined French Canadian Louis Jolliet to map the Mississippi river. As they were paddling their way upstream on their return to the Great Lakes, they encountered a Miami tribe by the shore. The Miami tipped them off to a shortcut to Canada. Instead of paddling all the way up to Lake Superior, they told them they could hang a right at the Illinois River and head north through Lake Michigan instead. The Illinois River becomes the Des Plaines River at what is now Joliet, Illinois. The river then opened to an estuary later dubbed Mud Lake near present day Lyons, Illinois – a suburb of Chicago. Thus began a days long slog tugging a boat made from birch logs; a portage to Lake Michigan and beyond.Plodding their way to the mouth of the great lake on the horizon, Jolliet got to thinking about all the fur he could trade now that he knew this shortcut. After all, this portage connected two pivotal North American transportation routes – the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. In his journal he wrote, “We could easily sail a ship to Florida…All that needs to be done is to dig a canal through but half a league of prairie from the lower end of Lake Michigan to the River of St. Louis [today’s Illinois River].”Jolliet and Marquette spread the word and soon many others were trading through the Chicago Portage. The first to settle was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable and his wife Kitihawa in the 1780s. Jean Baptiste was of French and African descent and Kitihawa was from the local Potawatomi tribe. They were married ceremoniously among her people in the 1770s and then, having converted to Catholicism, were married in 1788 in Cahokia, Illinois in a Catholic ceremony. They, and their two children, went on to build a successful farm and trading post in a well appointed log cabin. They are considered the founders of what we now call the city of Chicago. Jean Baptiste died the year Gurdon Hubbard and his leech bitten crew showed up in 1818.GRID AS YOU GROWThat same year the Illinois General Assembly was formed, the young state’s first government. Hubbard settled in Chicago and eventually became a legislator. He lobbied tirelessly for supplemental funding from the Federal government to build a canal that would replace the pernicious Chicago Portage. It worked. They broke ground with Hubbard wielding the spade, in 1836. By this time Hubbard had also started Chicago’s first stockyard and meat packing plant. He knew, just as Jolliet did over one hundred years before, that Chicago was destined to be an attractive port town; a symbol of growth and prosperity. But neither could have imagined what happened next. It’s hard to believe today.When Hubbard broke ground on the canal, the population was around 4,000 people. Ten years later, in 1850, that number grew nearly eight-fold to 30,000 people. By 1886, around the time Hubbard was buried just north of Chicago at Graceland Cemetery, there were nearly one-million people living in Chicago. Immigrant populations were flooding the city for work, many as laborers on the canal. Land prices were skyrocketing. “In 1832, a small lot on Clark Street sold for $100. Two years later, the same property sold for $3,000. And a year after that, it sold for $15,000. A newspaper reporter wrote, “[E]very man who owned a garden patch stood on his head, [and] imagined himself a millionaire….”It didn’t take long for survey crews to start gridding Chicago into tiny parcels. All spring I’ve been chronicling the spread of large-scale cadastral mapping across the country. While Jefferson’s vision of a gridded country included plats for developing cities, his primary objective was the expansion of land for agrarian purposes. After all, he was a farmer. But urban populations were starting to mushroom in the 1830s as masses of immigrants flooded the country. Especially Chicago. Surveyors got to work dividing plats of land into skinny rectangles packed into gridded squares divided by roads and bounded by the curving shores of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan. This 1834 map shows the land surveyed in Chicago from 1830 to 1834. Enough to handle the nearly 4,000 residents and growing. By 1850 the population was nearing 30,000 and the city needed to expand. By 1855 the population had already jumped to 80,000. That’s 10,000 people a year flooding a few square miles. You can see in the 1855 map above just how much Chicago grew. When the city was founded in the 1830s it was about 2.5 miles square. By 1863 it grew west, south, and north four to six miles in each direction. Urban sprawl started in Chicago almost as soon as it was founded. BILLY AND ANDY RAND MCNALLYThe opening of the Chicago River canal in 1848 and the penetration of rail lines in the 1850s culminated in making Chicago a freight and logistics transportation hub. A system that birthed iconic companies like Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck & Co. By 1850 Chicago was the biggest city in the country. The intense growth of the city coincided with increased ethnic diversity, complex urban activity, and a shifting cultural context. It called for new methods of infrastructure management, land use policy, and regulation — but also new maps. Mapping became tools not just for documenting the record, but for managing complexity, decision making, and the risk of calamity.This 1869 map shows the various insurance schemes spread throughout the city. Among other purposes, it was used to assess fire risk. A need that became abundantly clear two years later when the Great Chicago Fire destroyed nearly three and a half square miles of the city leaving 300 people dead. Advances in printing technology spawned new varieties of publications, including maps. A year after the Great Chicago Fire, a printmaker from Massachusetts, William Rand, and an Irish immigrant, Andrew McNally, printed their first map. Their newly formed business, Rand McNally & Co., started off printing train tickets and schedules for the dizzying strands of trains snaking through the city. Soon Rand McNally became synonymous with ‘map’ in the United States becoming the country’s most dominant mapping company. ANOTHER SUPER HERO FROM IOWABy 1870 48 percent of Chicago residents were immigrants; more than any other city in the country. All this urban activity brought prosperity to a rising privileged social elite, but it also brought poverty, destitution, and segregation to the disadvantaged. Last week I talked about the 1890 U.S. census. It was the birth of American ‘Big Data’ tabulated with newly invented punch cards. America’s ‘father of mapmaking’, Henry Gannett, was tasked with charting and mapping the data. It was an impressive feat, that included new methods of modeling and visualizing the growing ethnicities in America. But the analysis included overtones of patriarchy and racist theories. Five years later, out of the slums of Chicago, emerged a more thoughtful, altruistic, yet critical counter maps. In 1895 an all-women boarding house, called the Hull House, went about collecting, analyzing, and mapping socio-demographic data aimed at improving the lives of their immigrant neighbors. One of those women was from my home state of Iowa. Her name is Agnes Sinclair Holbrook. She was born in Marengo, Iowa in 1867 and went on to study at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She studied math, science, and literature earning a bachelor of science degree in 1892. She then moved to Chicago to live with other women like her in the Hull House. This was a home to women with university degrees situated in a poor Chicago neighborhood. The Hull House mission, which came from one of the founders, Jane Addams, was to empower educated women through her “Three R’s”: Residence, Research, and Reform. Instead of distantly studying anonymously surveyed data she encouraged,“close cooperation with the neighborhood people, scientific study of the causes of poverty and dependence, communication of these facts to the public, and persistent pressure for [legislative and social] reform..." Young Agnes Sinclair Holbrook collected and analyzed local data from her resident immigrant community and visualized it on a map. Her intent was to inform and influence local policy but to also lift up, empower, and encourage immigrant women to seek their own opportunities. Below is an example of her work from the 1895 Hull House publication.Digitally produced urban maps like Holbrook’s are common place today. We’re practically numbed by their presence as they bob in the rivers of social media feeds. You can bet Agnes Sinclair Holbrook would have thousands of followers if she were alive today. She’d probably also be disappointed in the progress made toward social justice. Holbrook wasn’t a fan of sterile, dispassionate pronouncements. She believed simply stating the facts doesn’t get traction, if you want to make change it must come with the right action. As Holbrook writes in the 1895 publication of Hull-House Maps and Papers,“Merely to state symptoms and go no farther would be idle; but to state symptoms in order to ascertain the nature of disease, and apply, it may be, its cure, is not only scientific, but in the highest sense humanitarian.” She didn’t stop there. She had a bigger message for America’s powerful, white, male elite. It’s a message that is so relevant today, that we’d be wise to reflect and learn from the socio-political environment of the late 1800s. Here the 28 year old Holbrook states, “The politicians work on the people's feelings, incite them against the men of the other party as their most bitter enemies; and if this doesn't succeed, they go to work deliberately to buy some. Thus adding insult to injury, they go off and set up a Pharisaic cry about the ignorance and corruption of the foreign voters.As everything in the old country has its price, it is not at all surprising that the foreigners believe such to be the case in this also. But Americans are to blame for this; for the better class of citizens, the men who preach so much about corruption in political life, and advocate reforms, never come near these foreign voters. They do not take pains to become acquainted with these recruits to American citizenship; they never come to their political clubs and learn to know them personally; they simply draw their estimates from the most untrustworthy source, the newspapers, and then mercilessly condemn as hopeless.”As Holbrook and the women of Hull House worked to better improve the lives of those in the city, the ‘better class of citizens’ were leaving it. Since the 1850s streetcar suburbs were popping up everywhere to whisk affluent commuters in and out of the city; including one of America’s first planned communities, Riverside, Illinois. It was designed by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead and it provided the bucolic utopia that continues to lure Americans from dense urban cities to this day. By 1873 Chicago had 11 different privately operated streetcar lines serving over 100 communities. Streetcar lines continued to stretch further distances all the way up to the twentieth century when the automobile arrived. This 1889 map shows the extent to which these suburbs dotted the surrounding landscape of Chicago.Many believe the proliferation of roadways and automobiles created suburban sprawl in Chicago and cities like it. But it was the streetcar suburbs of the 1800s — all crafted by real estate developers looking to cash in on opportunistic land grabs. The roads of Chicago present connect the nodes of Chicago’s past. As you can see on the map, one of those suburban communities is named Lyons. Remember Lyons? That’s where Jolliet and Marquette tugged their canoe through the slough. Then came Mr. Hubbard and the leeches too. Being the parasitic predators they are, they latch on to whatever life they encounter and forcefully, selfishly drain the life from unsuspecting victims. Showing a lack of mercy, they inject an anti-clotting chemical into the victim to prevent them from forging a natural occurring defense. And for every leech you manage to dislodge and dispatch, another appears. Waves of leeches will consume a host leaving only the leeches.As waves of European colonial expansionists and empire builders leeched the lifeblood from unsuspecting Indigenous humans and dignity seeking dreamers they polluted the environment with their oozing industrial excrement. And so as to not wallow in their own toxic waste, they crawled over the masses calling for help, and hopped on a streetcar in search of a pristine, natural, patch of prairie next to a meandering river or lake bordered by the plant the locals called Checagou. Subscribe at interplace.io
EP259- Listener Questions News Amazon is building Micro Fulfillment Centers to deliver fast-moving grocery & convenience SKUs in under 45mins. Locations include Seattle, DC, Baltimore, Dallas, Nashville, Detroit, Chicago, San Diego, Phoenix launching this year. Listener Questions Ted: will headless commerce take off in 2021? why/why not? RetailRazor: Amazon has been getting hit w/an endless series of media articles about their private label development at the expense of other merchants on the platform. But #retailers have been doing this since, well, forever. Ex. – Dept Stores private label apparel. Why is Amazon different? Wanda Cadigan: We’re seeing a big increase in visual media use cases for e-com. It’s the new digital proxy for in-store experience. Curious on your thoughts around shoppable video trends and adoption esp. in Americas. Darin Archer: When will we have a major paradigm shift from the online store? Category pages and PDP’s seem dated in the era of TikTok. Instagram shopping and all those other things are like pop-up shops. When will retailers make a big step change in the experience? Brendan Witcher: When will the Jason And Scot Show T-shirts finally be made available and can I have mine signed before you send it? You guys rock! Thanks for helping to keep balance in the (retail) Force. Kevin Cronin: Thoughts on e-com conversion tracking and how it has +/- impacted companies/industry. BinhWinn: What do you think is keeping Amazon from entering the promising African market? Kelly Goetsch: Looking forward to the episode! I’m seeing all the CX-related vendors (Salesforce, SAP, Bloomreach, Acquia, etc) building or buying CDPs in the past ~12 months. I get the value of CDPs but why were all of these acquisitions done so rapidly? Is this related to 3rd party cookies? tec_wiz: We have seen a significant “stimi” bounce on Amazon, do both of you feel the reopening exuberance will keep the sales acceleration going and if so for how long? Interested to see if you two are in the Jamie Dimon camp? Trevor Sumner: There will be a multi-billion media shift to in-store. Who controls the brand spend? Will it be media folks? Will shopper marketing and trade dollars increase? How will brand orgs need to transform to take advantage of the digitized store? Scott Silverman: What do you think will be the most surprising post-pandemic consumer behaviors that e-commerce retailers should prepare for? Episode 259 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded live on Thursday April 8, 2021. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 259 being recorded on Thursday April 8 I’m your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I’m here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:39] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason and Scot show listeners Jason how’s your spring going up there and sunny Chicago. Jason: [0:47] It is going well but you you’ve already thrown me for a loop I don’t deal with change and you took the year out of our intro thing so I total I’m totally messed up now. Scot: [1:01] It’s 20 21 so you’re back. Jason: [1:04] Thanks thanks I appreciate you appreciate you saving me ya know spring is going good we had two lovely days of like, like High 70 low 80 degree weather here and I got super excited and then as is often going to happen in Chicago it was all a mirage because today it’s like 16 raining. Scot: [1:24] Want want want sorry to hear that here in North Carolina it’s funny because we’ve had, Bob’s Ilion New people move to our state some of them from the Midwest a lot from California New York and when they move here we’re always like hey in February, used to be get ready for pollen season it’s going to be like unlike anything you’ve ever seen in their lap and like we have pain and San Francisco are you crazy and then are real pollen season hits which were in the thick of right now and they lose their minds because you literally get a you know coating on your car where your car is essentially just looks like it’s been painted yellow so we are in heavy heavy pollen season right now, I have seasonal allergies so I am you know pretty pretty loosey-goosey right now I think I’ve had like 16 Benadryl ‘s and 5’s vertex of so if I’m a little spacey it’s due to that. Jason: [2:14] I love that yeah I was going to ask if you like develop a stronger immunity system because that would that would wreak havoc on me although it has to be good for the car wash industry. Scot: [2:27] It is so that’s the computer that’s the Silver Lining so yes we we are very very busy right now so it’s good a good thing. Jason: [2:35] Yeah where I grew up in Southern California we had a very similar issue the saltwater from the beach would make all the cars filthy. Scot: [2:45] Good we will have to look at San Diego as a possible location. Jason: [2:49] Yeah the beachfront homes in San Diego. Scot: [2:53] So tonight we have a lot of good listener questions but before we get to that it wouldn’t be a Jason Scott show if we didn’t talk about a little breaking Amazon news. Jason: [3:11] News your margin is their opportunity. Scot: [3:20] Jason I was excited as our resident grocery Guru in the chief digital grocery retail. Grocery grocery store officer I wanted to get your expert opinion I saw this on Twitter I guess there’s a magazine called hungry and it’s missing a bunch of vowels H NG Ry, hindery and they had a scoop so they have confirmed that Amazon is building 11. A hundred and forty thousand square foot micro fulfillment centers. It’s kind of funny to talk about a hundred forty thousand square feet and taught micro but I guess you know when the alternative is a million it is small, and they are designed to move a hundred thousand fast-moving Grocery and convenience cues in less than 45 minutes, and the initial set of cities are Seattle Washington D.C Baltimore Dallas Nashville Detroit Chicago San Diego Phoenix and going to be launching them this year. This is super interesting to me because we had we’ve had several amazonians on the show past amazonians, and Amazon does these pretty big Cycles on an annual basis where they’re going to make big Investments and to me this was a really big signal that they’ve decided that this is an important category. So I tweeted about this and then I had several. [4:39] What I would call Amazon insiders not bullies but people that are maybe in orbit away from Amazon and know what’s kind of going on and the thing that surprised me is that there, they were saying that go puff we’ve talked a little bit about on the show but I want to use this entree into that to get your thoughts on that too. They are growing at a tremendous Pace I’ve heard several people say they have over a billion dollars in sales they are a retailer so it’s not a gmv Marketplace kind of thing so GM ve is real Revenue. And then they didn’t acquisition of an alcohol company that was also about a billion dollars so now they’ve got kind of a two billion dollar company they’re going after some categories and areas Amazon is very keen to get to so the grocery and alcohol, I looked him up in some of the databases that go plows raised over two billion dollars you know squarely in the, if passed the Unicorn status which is over a billion dollar valuation I think they’re into the DECA unicorn kind of status so really interesting moves here you’re kind of I guess a battle between these two folks breaking out into the open what do you think about all that. Jason: [5:49] Yeah yeah there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on there the maybe I’ll start with BevMo and work backwards to Amazon Amazon or go puff and work backwards to Amazon. The you know we talk a lot about covid accelerating trends that already existed this whole notion of. Delivering alcoholic beverages was already really starting to pick up some steam we’ve had drizzly on the show before which was one is one of the dominant players in in alcohol delivery and most of them are via these. These are complicated Marketplace models because you have to do the delivery from someone that has a liquor license. [6:30] And so then the pandemic vastly accelerated liquor delivery because under normal circumstances the vast majority of alcohol is consumed. What the industry calls on premises which means at a bar and so because you know Bars were closed or constrained so much, we certainly were consuming way more alcohol at home which means we had to buy it or get it delivered, we got a bunch of meals delivered from restaurants that weren’t allowed to bundle alcohol with them in many cases so all of these Trends made it really accelerated the alcohol delivery industry and. I don’t you know we don’t there’s not great numbers but my sense is that no one benefited more than go puff and partly because they, are closer to a first-party model so they did by a very significant alcohol chain on the west coast BevMo. Um so they own a bunch of their own liquor licenses they own a lot of product that they deliver to people, and they actually started out not delivering the liquor but delivering the snacks so go puff started out do everything you know Munchies presumably to people that were high. [7:47] Um hence the go puff delivering snacks on college campuses and so. Part of their model is they actually inventory their own snacks they have these micro fulfillment centers and so buying BevMo give them a bunch of liquor licenses and it also gave them a bunch of locations that they could stage. [8:09] There there fast-moving food alcohol items and go puff is always focused on cold so they’re one of the best. Nationwide cold chain one hour delivery services so if you need to store something cold and then deliver it. They’re one of the few options out there so for all those reasons. Go puff is booming then you know we throw in the trend we’ve talked about a lot on this show the retail media networks and all these sellers you know monetizing their business by selling ads, so you know go puff has been able to successfully get a nice chunk of AD revenue from that, and I have to believe Amazon sees that and says hey we need you know they obviously have a lot of their own plans and capabilities around to our delivery of those kind of items, and I’ll bet you go puff is sort of accelerating Amazon’s aspirations. Scot: [9:06] Another another Insider told me that go puff has an ad Network that’s kind of getting a fair amount of traction and that’s another thing that Amazon’s attention you know we’ve talked about on the show that they’re their ad Network. It’s getting a lot of steam it’s kind of getting to be almost the scale of AWS and contributing quite a bit of profit it’s in the kind of pesky other category so it has some other things mixed in there but from what we can tell it’s pretty pretty large and growing making Amazon the third largest ad Network behind Google and Facebook. What do you think about does that make sense to you or you familiar with this go puff ad Network. Jason: [9:46] Yeah a little bit It’s Tricky I do think they’re generating some significant Revenue. The the wrinkle is. Advertising for alcohol is dicey so you know so I think what go puff is generating the most is is right these ad revenue from the these like cpg snacks and things like that that are getting delivered, with the alcohol like the you know the bummer is the alcohol people spend so much money on pram and with that clothes they would have shifted a bunch of money into these other channels but it’s. It’s risky to do and and you know most of the big players aren’t willing to take those. Those sort of risks with with the various compliance and to do so. So that’s a little complicated and then I you know I would say they’re probably generating a bunch of Revenue but it’s not a very mature platform with a lot of tools yet and so I haven’t seen any. Any sizing on it. Scot: [10:46] So that is the news and now let’s go into. Jason: [11:01] This question question question question question. Scot: [11:08] All right our first listener question comes from Ted and he says and I’m going to shoot this one over to you Jason well headless Commerce take off in 2021 why or why not. Jason: [11:23] Yeah, talked about a lot we’ve covered it few times on this show just for people that may not be familiar it’s a it’s a method of. Implementing an e-commerce site so instead of a piece of software that’s kind of a monolithic software that has all the check out functions and product catalog functions and all those sorts of things with the user interface. Um it’s a it’s a system where, where the software company provides a bunch of apis and you kind of build your own e-commerce experience leveraging those apis and it generally you build your own user interface so hence it’s headless, um and it’s the definitely the most trendy architecture right now it’s talked about the most. [12:16] The and it kind of is catching on but the reality is we’re just not really going to know because one of the problems with headless Comet or it’s a benefit of headless Commerce but it’s a problem when you’re tracking it is. You can do it very piecemeal right so you could you could have mostly monolithic software and you could say oh you know what, my checkout isn’t very good and I can’t take all the the alternative payment methods I’d like so I’m just gonna, improve my checkout flow and so you could add a couple headless apis just for the checkout flow and it could be. Four percent of your total e-commerce site but now you’re partly headless so you know so I would say. [13:02] Most people that build something new are going to adopt a technology like that but it often is very incremental versus a big bang where you kind of rip out everything you had and put something else in so it’s it’s a little bit like the. The so slowly increasing water temperature in the Frog like we’re all getting boiled by headless Commerce but like I don’t know when you’ll officially declare it like taking off versus not taking off. Scot: [13:29] Yeah and so some of the big players so there’s Commerce tool or tools and then, Faisal has a company called Fabric and we had some confusion over multiple Fabrics but he is one of the fabrics and then anyone else there’s because I’ve seen I’ve seen some of the Shopify folks and sidebar it seems like they’ve hired everyone I know in e-commerce at Shopify those guys are hiring it’s like some kind of an incredible clip right now. I see them all talking about how they effectively, are at least framing Shopify as being a headless player which doesn’t make sense to me bless there’s like some study Pi is enough moveth so who are the players and is Shopify a player. Jason: [14:10] Yeah so there’s kind of a couple categories of platforms that that offer headless Commerce and it’s such a buzzword I like a lot of other things I would argue people that like. Are are not very truly headless Commerce. Have an offering they would call head owes Commerce but so there’s a bunch of traditional platforms that were monoliths that saw this trend coming and kind of pivoted right so, to me that would be someone like an Alaska path, that that kind of had a turnkey platform and they really like focused on the Headless version of that platform and today I think. [14:45] Any new customer is probably mostly headless the all of the the brand new platforms tend to be headless so certainly fabric. Um There there’s a bunch of small players it’s pretty fragmented industry you mentioned Commerce tools which to my knowledge was really the first platform out there that was headed west so there now they’ve been I want to say they’ve been doing headrests for like 10 years they were originally a spin-off of hybris before sap bottom. And so those guys have been doing ahead of us for a long time and. Traction but then there’s the the traditional SAS players and the two biggest examples would be Salesforce Commerce Cloud which formerly was demandware and Shopify in both of those are. Monolith software that’s offered via SAS but both companies have recognized the Headless Trend and have launched. Separate products which are an API SAS model so you can rent. Salesforce Commerce apis and build your own head with solution that leverages the Salesforce infrastructure and similarly you can. Via Shopify plus you can rent apis from Shopify and build a headless solution and Shopify plus so they they both are very legitimate. [16:11] Head West Solutions but I would say you know as a percentage of their total user base it’s a small minority of their user base that have that headless configuration. And then in the case of Salesforce one other note I would make is, one of the problems with headless is okay so now you don’t have a user experience or a GUI and you have to build that yourself and there’s cost associated with that and you may or may not be good at that you may not follow all the, the industry convention so there’s pros and cons to not getting a, a store in a box and particularly as we talked about on this show a lot mobile is so complicated and evolving so fast that there was a company out there called MOBA 5 that had built a really good. Mobile user interface that could leverage all of these these Head West Commerce tax and they were acquired last year by Salesforce because that’s. There’s so much energy there so now somewhat ironically, you can buy MOBA fi user interface and Salesforce Commerce cloud apis and put them together and I you know you’re technically headless on the one hand but on the other hand you got a complete TurnKey solution from Salesforce. Scot: [17:30] Yeah it’s like when you were a kid remember those things that had like three little sections and you can change the purple head the body and the feet so sounds like that’s kind of where we’re going to. Jason: [17:39] Yeah I mean that the simple metaphor for these platforms are like Legos right so you know you get a kid a little Legos and you can you can snap them together like the picture on the outside of the box or you can you know snap them together in an entirely different way if you. [17:57] Um so let’s go to the next question also from Twitter this is from retail razor and the question is Amazon has been getting hit with an endless series of media articles about the private label development at the expense of other merchants on the platform, but retailers have been doing this since well forever example department stores private label apparel why is Amazon different. Scot: [18:25] Yeah and this is a while I’m an Amazon Guru I’m not a huge on politics but but this is a political kind of thing that’s going on here so you know you’ve got so you got Jeff Bezos world’s richest man I think at this point yeah I think Elon is kind of catching up to him at some point I think they crossed for a little bit one what does. Jason: [18:50] They did but it shouldn’t even count because you know Jeff Bezos has like ex-wife that also has 40 billion dollars. Scot: [18:57] True yeah but she’s not giving it away as quickly as you can so she may actually. Jason: [19:02] She’s much more admirable than him that’s true. Scot: [19:05] She may be the millionaire poor house and then, you know another thing is he bought the Washington Post which is you know also seems to have caused a lot more political kind of Venom to come his way. And you know Amazon itself is a big company and you know there’s they’re just easy to shoot at and so you’re hearing a lot of talk antitrust talk a lot of folks want to break them up, the two most vocal that I see are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren yeah they very much want to break those guys up Bernie Sanders is always talking about how they pay more and you know. If you look at the disparity between what Jeff Bezos makes and the $15 an hour employee that’s a big number. [20:01] Let’s Elizabeth warrant then there’s Amazon doesn’t pay taxes because they take every penny they make in plow it back into growing and hiring more people and and buying where houses and building, we just talked about they’re going to build you know what it was at Eleven Hundred and forty thousand square feet facility centers that’s not cheap I don’t know. Each of those maybe 50 million bucks so that’s 6 billion dollars right there, you know so so they don’t they take every penny of profit and they just see such a big opportunity they keep plowing it in and therefore they don’t make profit and you get taxed on profit so they don’t really pay taxes and then of course everything he does a lot of you know. Corporate all legal but corporate setups so that they can avoid taxes like. They’ll have their European group and some kind of a tax-free area and you know they will set up the structure of the companies to minimize taxes globally and then also the United States. [21:02] So I think that’s why they’re under a Target and then you know there’s it’s also really easy to find third-party sellers that are brands that have sold on there and a private label came out of their stuff and it’s, it’s kind of catnip for reporters to find a, it’s very easy to find people that are very upset about Amazon I see it on Twitter all the time yeah there’s third-party sellers that are very unhappy about the way they’re treated and creates a lot of possible content. So that’s that’s my take I think it is. If this ever got into a court and you were looking at the facts I think retail razors right that there’s nothing new going on here and it’s kind of silly to argue this, it’s even silly the argue the antitrust argument because you know I think it’s pretty fair to Define Amazon in the same context as Walmart right and. [21:57] Walmart is as big or bigger so it’s not like Amazon is got some. Position compared to like a Walmart targets really big there are other very big large retailers and there’s it’s also hard to point to note the consumer being harmed. Poor consumers they’re getting cheaper stuff faster its there’s not a lot of, it’s not like a monopoly where your price gouging or there’s no choice anything Amazon’s Lord prices and increased choice. Now that being said if you look at Europe Dave kind of defined monopolies differently in there it doesn’t have to be a consumer damage so there’s a lot of talk about that kind of coming, and then the Biden Administration hired someone that has that similar kind of a take on on antitrust that it’s really. The size and not the the consumer. [22:50] So those are my loose reading of some of the political winds you know what. My take is companies move a thousand times faster than governments and they’ll be able to, navigate whatever the government throws out them succeed if we all remember well you and I remember the Microsoft all the who are around antitrust, Microsoft’s doing okay after that they’re they did find they had to just kind of do some, little things around their browser they spend a bunch of money around it but at the end of the day it was effectively a slap on the wrist of anything so so I don’t think it’s just a lot of noise and I don’t really foresee there being anything that slows down Amazon from this. How about you Jason. Jason: [23:31] Yeah I mean there’s a lot there I won’t rehash it all but. [23:39] I think you’re right like I think the biggest companies in capitalist economies are always, targets for a lot of concern and they’re generally there are always some valid concerns and there’s always a lot of. Scrutiny that isn’t necessarily valid right and certainly you know Walmart’s head is fair its fair share and before that Sears did and, before that Montgomery Ward’s and Woolworths and A&P like you can go back as far as you want, these big huge retailers like there have always been concerns about their size. The bottom line is the you know us antitrust laws are not super strong and the way they’re in written and enforced today. I just don’t think. Amazon has very much risk so per your point they’re probably way more exposed in Europe where there’s a much broader perspective on, but the the thing that a lot of these lawmakers are going after is just, right / retail razors Point like is it kind of a misunderstanding like there’s this thing oh my gosh Amazon’s using. [24:49] Sales data from their third-party sellers to design their first party products and when you say it like that it doesn’t sound very fair, but the point is retailers have been doing that for the entire history of retail I mean you know Sears had a lot of Their Own Private Label products in the Sears catalog you know listeners may be familiar with Brands like Kenmore and crap. [25:12] Craftsman and you know all these these various brands that Sears built right you know doing these exact same thing so, that’s not new they’re some antitrust people would say oh but you know what’s different about Amazon is there also a platform in an ad Network and they get extra data from that, that a traditional retailer wouldn’t get so they would say I don’t object to Amazon using the retail data to make their own products but I object to them using their, their platform data and their their the ad spend data that they’re getting, but even that to me is a thin argument because every other retailer have advertising programs and co-op programs and slotting fees and things like that so I just. Um I think there’s some legitimate things to look at all these companies about but I think that particular one is a hard argument and and again the US antitrust laws are pretty heavily in Amazon’s favor so I think we’re always going to hear about this stuff but I don’t think. Amazon’s fundamentally different than than previous private-label efforts the one thing that is better about Amazon you know and therefore you know potentially more concerning is. Amazon. [26:32] Collects a lot more data about how you shop and what you don’t buy right so a traditional retailer doesn’t know very well. What other products you considered on the way to buying the brand that you bought but Amazon you know because by virtue of them being online, they collect much more data about your browsing behavior before you buy and so that’s not saying it’s it’s an antitrust violation to use that data but that is a new data set that you know Sears and Walmart, didn’t necessarily have it at their disposal so yeah I think we’ll keep hearing about it the, you kind of alluded to it but one funny thing that happened this week our Prime not funny dramas on, the rumor is that Jeff was upset that Amazon Executives weren’t defending Amazon aggressively enough for all of this this noise, and so it appears that a bunch of Amazon execs totally stepped up their social presence and started arguing. [27:30] Up to and including arguing with like sitting Congress people on Twitter, um a congressperson you know is complaining about labor standards in Amazon and made reference to Amazon employees having a pee and Bottles because they can’t take a break, and a senior vice president Amazon like chimed in like that’s absurd I can’t believe you believe those rumors, if that was really true do you think people would really want to work for us. Um and then a week later Amazon had to print a retraction and say like it turns out a bunch of our employees do have to be in bottles. [28:03] But so do UPS’s so that probably like when you have to issue that press release that’s not a good look. Scot: [28:10] Yeah that’s a tough one and it is confusing because there’s the DSP program aren’t really Amazon employees but they’re just that I guess during a branded truck they get that kind of assumed. Jason: [28:22] Yeah so again. Scot: [28:23] This one is this next one is for you Jason and it comes from listener Wanda cadogan. [28:47] Wanda hope you enjoyed that we know that’s your favorite song now to your question we are seeing a big increase in visual media use cases for e-commerce it’s the new digital proxy for in-store experience I’m curious about your thoughts around Shopville video Trends in adoption especially in the Americas. There’s a there was another question that will kind of group together here in this one came from Darren Archer when will we have a major paradigm shift from the online store category pages and pdp’s seem dated in the era of tick tock Instagram shopping and all these other things that are like pop-up shops when will retailers big change step change in the experience. Jason: [29:27] Yeah both good questions and I do I do agree they’re bundled and side note I think I’m assuming daren’t an Archer is a former Adobe Alaska path and now at the Gap so so he, has definitely been around a lot of the issues that were we’re talking about today. So so yeah the. Video Commerce and is often called live-streaming Commerce although a ton of it is not live streaming is huge right now it’s it’s even Huger in China where by some estimates, eleven or twelve percent of all e-commerce is live streaming, um more more consumers start their shopping trip on Ali Baba’s a live streaming site than they do on Team all right now, so so this live streaming Commerce has totally exploded in China and there. Appears to be appetite for it in the US as well and so you’re definitely seeing. The platforms that that can support it so most notably Instagram and Tik Tok. Um are we leaning heavily into it and we’ve seen Walmart due to two pilots where they had Commerce events on Tik-Tok now, and. [30:54] The jury’s out on like social commerce in the in the west is way smaller than it is in China so it may be 12 percent of e-commerce and in China and it’s like 4% of e-commerce here so, so it has a ways to go in the jury is out on whether Chinese consumers are different than Western consumers and it’s never going to catch on or whether they’re just ahead of Western consumers and they kind of WEP frog. Um so we’ll have to see but I can tell you a ton of retailers and brands are super interested right now and the part of the reason is implied in Wanda’s question. Um a sort of Inconvenient Truth about all of this e-commerce that we’ve invented is. We’ve made it very easy to find products that you know you want and buy them and we’ve taken all the friction out of the buying process and so you know there’s a saying. E-commerce solved buying but broke shopping, right so you know it’s super easy to buy stuff you can go on Amazon there’s 800 million products you type it in the search engine a product pops up you click one button and it shows up two hours later you’re good. Um weather is not is. [32:09] Discovering products you never knew you wanted right like there’s never like creating demand for products a lot of the things that traditionally stores were good at and a lot of you know Discovery experiences that happen in stores. E-commerce isn’t particularly good at and so the hypothesis is that this social commerce. Has the potential to replace all those Discovery experiences and the way I think of it as kind of decoupling Commerce like the buying and browsing used to both happen in a store and that was kind of the monolithic solution. [32:46] The digital disruption of Commerce means. Buying and browsing now can be decoupled and browsing can happen in all these micro moments on Tick-Tock and Pinterest and and taobao, and the buying can happen in another moment on Amazon or Walmart or or wherever else so, I definitely think there, it is we’re going to see it can continue to increase I don’t know whether we’ll catch up to China in the near future or not but they’re you know appears to be a lot of Headroom and therefore sure is a lot of interest. Of in retailers and brands that want to experiment in the space and platforms that want to you know capitalize on those experiments so I have major, social commerce initiatives with almost every client right now that are kind of you know mostly in the test and learn mode. Scot: [33:43] Um couple things you didn’t mention Amazon’s poke around here they have Amazon live which is this video program that’s kind of running and it’s pretty terrible right now but you know I’ve seen some stuff start to get some traction there. They have a couple of influencers that that hop on there and don’t forget that Amazon owns twitch so there’s, there’s Twitches really started with video game streaming and there’s there’s a lot more that platform is widening there’s some interesting things we’ve had some Congress people get on there we’ve had, um [34:18] There’s a lot of interesting music content and then there’s a lot of innovative new social media companies like Clubhouse and some point maybe they’ll be some selling that happens to some of those channels. The other one is I highly recommend everyone make sure you listen to our deep dive episode recently. We talked about all the changing privacy rules I think that’s going to be another Catalyst for this because Facebook is in this kind of squeeze between Apple and Google in a way. Facebook doesn’t have a platform like they do so, Facebook could lose some ad revenue and they’re doing a lot to replace that through a variety of different experiments and I think we’ll see a Facebook doing a lot more in this this area, and they on Instagrams and Instagram alive is getting a lot of Engagement as well so, a lot of interesting platforms were this kind of live streaming and more social commerce could come from. Jason: [35:16] Yeah hundred percent Amazon’s done a ton of experiments and and twitch is a very powerful platform so like I certainly. I think Amazon is you know at the front of this trend along with several other Front Runners. Scot: [35:32] This one this one this next question is it’s a it’s a tough one so I’m going to throw it at you here comes from Brendan Witcher and I can’t hear his name without hearing the toss a coin to hear what your song and anyway mr. whicher says when will the Jason and Scot show t-shirts finally be made available in can I have mine signed before you send it you guys rock thanks for helping to keep balance in the, parentheses retail Force thanks Brendon Jason any your our chief swag officer Chief swag digital retail grocery officer what what’s the take. Jason: [36:08] Yeah great question Brandon appreciate it. So we do have some swag and I’m sure I’m going to regret saying this but if you ping me on Twitter I will be happy to send any listeners some Jason and Scott. Riri a pliable stickers for your laptops and and the your bedroom windows and all that good stuff. We have not offered t-shirts I’m open to it I have to be honest got and you weigh in on this as well. Rrr logo Works reasonably as podcast cover art, but it’s kind of intricate for a t-shirt I just I’m not sure what looks cool like I feel like we need a more elegant logo. For a T-shirt and then side note I would also point out like you and I have both lost some significant weight since the characters were done so I like part of me before we invested in a lot of apparel I’d want like skinny or characters. Scot: [37:12] Yeah yeah we’ll have to maybe we’ll have a con reader contest readers can submit their their artwork let’s see you again from and then most of. Jason: [37:22] Yeah and side note when he says bring balance to the force I assume we all knew that you’re the dark side of that. Scot: [37:29] Okay ouch I’ll point out that your son is clearly on the dark side. Jason: [37:36] Well but my son also likes you more than me so that’s further proof. Scot: [37:40] I can’t no accounting for Taste okay back to real questions so this one is from Kevin Cronin what are your thoughts on e-commerce conversion tracking and how it has positively and negatively impacted companies in the industry. Jason: [37:59] Wow so I don’t know what your angle for asking this question is but it’s a great question in my mind I am anti e-commerce conversion so it’s a. [38:10] Super important and useful metric but for my entire career I’ve been walking into situations where people were using it as a kpi and for me it’s an incredibly stupid kpi because I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had clients a Json I want to hire you to improve my conversion, and my answer is always the same that’s awesome I accept because, I’m gonna do a white make your eCommerce site password only so that only good customers that I know have buying intent are going to come in and your conversion rates going to go through the roof, you’re your revenue and traffic will go way down right because conversion is related to all these other things, um and while it’s possible to do multi-session conversion the overwhelming majority of people when they talk about e-commerce conversion are talking about single session conversion, and very often it’s not profitable the cell one thing one time. And so again so for all of those reasons I think you need better kpis like for sure conversion is a metric that that should be included in your. Your overall ecosystem but that’s not the thing that should be steering your business and and I don’t know if this is, what you were implying in your question Kevin but like there’s a shockingly high amount of e-commerce operators that that give too much Credence to conversion. Scot: [39:37] Interesting or you guys give products away if you really want to increase conversion. Jason: [39:42] Yeah yeah I can sell dollar bills for for 98 cents and have a very high conversion rate I would throw. I had something else I was going to add to the conversion conversation but I’ve totally lost my train of thought so I should have come to rehearsal. Scot: [40:00] Are so all the tracking changes aren’t going to really change conversion while still no when people are on our side. Jason: [40:09] On site conversion again if you’re doing more nuanced multi-touch attribution type conversions there some of the depreciation of the third party cookies and the in the mobile tracking is. Going to make that more difficult so we’ll see how that that all. Toys out oh I do remember my other point on conversion a fun fact about conversion average conversion rates on e-commerce sites today, are almost identical to what they were in 2000 like the its chin mobile has changed a lot but. [40:46] The the overall desktop conversion rate hasn’t changed very much like a cross, there’s huge deviation but across a ton of sites it’s about 2% of Visitors by something as we’ve already talked about. Stupid metric and a lot of those people didn’t come to the side to buy something maybe they wanted to check your store hours or your your your store address or all sorts of other things, but what I always chuckle about that is there’s this whole industry of conversion rate optimization companies and what they do is they come in with this one tactic which is multivariate testing, and they say like we’re going to improve your user experience and dramatically improve your conversion rate and there’s a bunch of companies that have been doing that for 20 years, and yet the conversion rate in our experiences today is exactly the same as it was 20 years ago and so like we like to joke that like all conversion optimization regresses to the mean. How’s that for a math joke. Scot: [41:45] It is good if conversion isn’t a good kpi then what are Jason recommended gibbous. Jason: [41:53] Yeah so go listen to. Our customer lifetime value show with Dan McCarthy and and to me metrics around LTV or seal the are much more valuable, then then just conversion rate even if you’re going to adopt a conversion rate I like to do some some more. More derived conversion rates that I sometimes call the real conversion rate where I infer your mission from some of your on-site behavior and I only look at the conversion rate of people that actually had some buying intent right so, so in that example you would, you would take all the people that used your store locator or you know left on the rating and review page or something else or the warranty page you wouldn’t count all of them in your conversion rate because they probably had some mission that they accomplished on your website that was other than buying something but for sure. Having a multi-touch attribution system and ultimately getting to a COV or LTV as the way to go as far as I’m concerned. So let’s move on to the next question bin win what do you guys think is keeping Amazon from entering the promising African Market. Scot: [43:20] Yeah Amazon’s Geographic expansion has definitely slowed if you look at kind of the last markets they’ve opened up, think they’re opening a Poland right now, India has been a big one and they’ve just really that one seems to I’ll use this analogy of kind of the snake eating the pig right so so India seems they went storming in there and it seems to have been a handful for them they really haven’t done a huge meaningful expansion since India my recollection I don’t think Poland would count as huge, then there’s Brazil and Australia are kind of in that category of most recently geographies they’ve opened and I think what’s going on there is. You know they have to evaluate every opportunity just like any other company even though they’re huge they have not endless resources so they’re always having to figure out where to apply them. And you know I could say the same thing for South America South America. Commerce is really complicated because you’ve got a big cluster of countries you’ve got different languages currencies shipping things, now mercadolibre in South America has gone in there and figured all that out Africa is you take, you take South America and I think Africa is like four times the complexity there inside of Africa you’ve got on the order of 50 countries. [44:45] Lots of complexity and you know if your Amazon do you. Go after that or can you go get that in 10 years let it mature and worry more about go puff taking you know a big grocery category United States, so I think that’s really what it is it’s a prioritization exercise and for whatever reason Africa just has made it to that priority I guess you could say they’ve also expanded the Middle East through that acquisition they did, of a big Marketplace there yeah haven’t really heard much about that I haven’t heard them adding 1 p 2 that or anything or I only think they rebranded I think they wanted it as almost like Zappos as its own kind of little Standalone thing sounds kind of weird because in the past when they would go into a new geography by acquisition they would Rebrand it too Amazon Japan it was on China this raw Acquisitions to my knowledge they haven’t rebranded suit could all and kind of the brand their Stokes I think that’s what is required is a sure thing Jason Do you have a. Jason: [45:51] Yeah well I’m not sure if you’re aware of this but strategy is actually one of the words in my title. [45:58] And it’s a little known fact but in order to get a strategy certificate you have to have a great affinity for a 2 by 2 Matrix, and I don’t know if you remember who did this I feel bad that I don’t but I used to attend the channel advisor conferences and they would always do this great. Session on the latest trends and opportunities in global expansion and they always started with this 2 by 2 Matrix and, one axis is complexity and the other axis is opportunity right and so you think complexity how hard is it to go into that, Channel what you know what’s the regulatory environment what’s the currency environment what’s the language environment and Africa is actually High complexity because, there really is no African continent from a Commerce standpoint, there’s a bunch of countries there’s like 50 for different countries mostly with unique languages and unique regulations and unique currencies so the complexity is very high, and the opportunity at the moment is pretty low penetration of e-commerce in Africa on a per capita basis is much lower in the spend is much lower than a lot of these more established market so I, I’m sure there’s a long-term aspiration for Amazon to dominate the whole planet before they get to Mars but, in the short run I just feel like that Africa hasn’t done as well on that on that two by two Matrix that I got from Channel advisor. Scot: [47:26] Yeah and I’ve actually talked to a fair number of South Africans and they order a lot from Amazon and Amazon has some kind of a global cross-border trade thing where you can actually shop from Amazon and get it shipped to you in South African and not crazy amount of time so there is an interesting not native Amazon shopping going on in certain areas of Africa that I’ve heard about. Jason: [47:52] Yeah for sure and not saying there’s not an opportunity now I’m just saying if you’re if you have limited treasure that it may not you know you may get more value out of your India investment then you are Africa and the short run. Scot: [48:04] Yeah and if you’re already like covering half of the opportunity through this cross-border trade solution than that even is better. All right here’s one for you Jason this comes from Kelly gauche I think is how you’re going to feel so looking forward to that pisode I’m seeing all the CX related vendors Salesforce sap Bloom reach, acquia Etc building or buying cdp’s in the past 12 months I get the value of cdp’s but why we’re all of these Acquisitions done so rapidly is this related to the third-party cookie changes coming. Jason: [48:42] Good question so sidenote Kelly is the chief technology officer at Commerce tools who were talking about earlier and he’s also the author of. I think at least two books that are published by Riley on headless Commerce so we probably should have forwarded the Headless Commerce question to Kelly. With regards to his CDP question for listeners that may not be familiar CDP stands for customer data platform. Um and so this is a tool that was primarily developed for advertising although it’s now used for some other things. Where you build a database of unique customer IDs and what you know about those customers and you use it for marketing purposes and mostly for targeting ads win to win to show what adds to what customers. Um and they are super trendy right now the. [49:38] Has the acquisition spree been been accelerated by the Privacy changes that we talked about a couple weeks ago. My short answer is probably but it’s interesting because those privacy changes both help and hurt cdp’s, they make that first party data in a CDP more valuable, um but they actually make it harder to collect that data and they make it harder to activate that data on not first-party data and so I in the aggregate. I’m not sure. [50:14] I sort of doubt that all these Acquisitions are because the cdp’s very clearly go up in value as a result of these privacy changes in some ways. [50:26] More customers opting out and more attention to privacy means that cdp’s get smaller, um and the the alternative versions of these things that don’t have uniquely identifiable data for an individual customer which are often called dmps. Maybe get bigger so that’s my long answer to say I don’t think it’s purely related to the, changes in privacy what I think is related to is, the the whole category in notion of personalization is super hyped and popular right now we actually did a deep dive on personalization a year ago that frankly I still think stands up pretty well, and in it I kind of highlight that at the moment a lot of this personalization is probably overhyped. [51:17] You know in the last year there was a lot of investment dollars that were you know looking harder for a home, you know there’s a lot of Buzz and hype around personalization and a lot of confusion about privacy and so I suspect that all of those factors. Um contributed to the the shopping spree and cdp’s but in the long run and because of the privacy issues I think the way this all plays out is. Um instead of it being super valuable for everyone to have a CDP that there’s going to be a small handful of cdp’s that are you know operated by people that have a ton of first-party data that are going to be most valuable. Scot: [51:57] Yeah I’ll just throw in there as a guy that watches kind of the SAS space and startups you have this kind of interesting musical chairs / Supply Domino thing that goes on, so you know one of the the big cloud players and I think the bigger ones would be like Salesforce sap Adobe then obviously. You know you have a little bit IBM they’re not really as aggressive especially on the e-commerce side now maybe Oracle but even they been quiet so those are the three really right now but you know what let’s say for some reason Salesforce buy something then the Corp Dev groups of other guys are out there looking and saying hmm. If there’s 10 of these then then you don’t have to do anything but if there’s one more than your Adobe or sap you have to be kind of quick because. These Cloud companies are really in an arms race against each other and. They never want to have one of them with some advantage over the others so it’s such a big space the multiples that those companies enjoy are so big, there’s a lot of Risk by not not having something so that could be one of the reasons you saw this kind of fast uptake by something was really more of, competitive concerns and keeping up with the Joneses and then a lack of Supply I don’t are there tons of CDP companies or are they kind of rare. Jason: [53:23] Um There there’s a ton of CDP companies that it’s a long tale type thing where only only you