Weekends at WalMart!
The Great American Weekend survey commissioned by the newspaper supplement formerly known as Life magazine, discussed in this AdAge article (free registration required), says that Americans are spending more and more of their weekend doing chores instead of relaxing and having fun.Some exciting revelations from this article:
Many Americans spend their weekends inside a very large, brightly lit box!
Almost half, 47%, do half or more of their grocery shopping on weekends. Discount chains such as Wal-Mart, Kmart and Target ranked as the favorite weekend shopping destinations.
While most Americans would prefer to spend the weekend with their families, they usually just watch a lot of TV instead.
Relaxing with family and spending time with spouse or partner were far and away chosen as the most important activities in their ideal weekend. In actual weekend activities, watching TV ties for second place with exercising, even though few list watching TV in their scheme for an ideal weekend.
If you are young, you probably caught your "case of the Mondays" from that filthy club bathroom you were puking in between DJ sets.
Adults 18-24 end their frenzied weekends exhausted (51%) rather than recharged (39%). Among young adults, 51% are ready to get back to work -- but 41% are depressed about Monday.
Incidently, WalMart has apologized for running a newspaper ad that featured footage of a Nazi book burning at Berlin's Opernplatz in 1933. The store apparently just wanted tell the local government of Flagstaff, which is opposing the building of their store, to go to hell.
Amusingly, the accompanying copy read: "Should we let government tell us what we can read? Of course not . . . So why should we allow local government to limit where we shop?" Why amusing? Well, WalMart is renowned for refusing to sell books it finds offensive in its stores. While there's no match or fuel, it can certainly spell the death of a book to lose such an important buyer. Monolithic corporate entities will be monolithic corporate entities I guess.
1 Comments:
A notable recent book WalMart pulled from its shelves is Jon Stewart's AMERICA, THE BOOK, which features inept but apparently "offensive" photoshop illos of the Supreme Court justices naked. While it's usually the case that not being in WalMart can cripple a book aiming for wide appeal, I was happy to see that this didn't hurt Stewart's book at all, in fact it remained solidly on the NYT bestseller list while all this was going on. So the result was loss of revenue to WalMart, and a reason for anyone who wanted the book to venture out into the World Outside
--Steve Mockus
Post a Comment
<< Home