Kettle Corn & Lance Armstrong
Aug. 23rd, 2005 08:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraKettle Corn Guy was the big Fair success story. He must have pulled in ten grand or more over the course of the five-day event and spent an hour yesterday lecturing us while we labored like donkeys, pulling apart our little mobile hot sauce boutique. I was enthralled! Give this man his own right-wing radio talk show! Donald Trump needs to start a publishing company and snap him right up.
"First of all, people don't go into spaces with low ceilings," Kettle Corn Guy said. "If they have to duck, forget about it. They won't go inside.
"And another thing – if it takes someone longer than five seconds to figure out what you're selling, he won't buy it. So you've got to have signs."
The last was the best though: "You want to use odd numbers as price points. People don't buy things when they cost even numbers."
To illustrate this point, he shared the instructive tale of how when he first started out on the Fair circuit, he used to price his bags of kettle corn at $3, $4 and $5. The $4 bag never moved. So then he jacked the price of that one up to five bucks, jacked the five buck bag up to seven and voila! the bags started running off the counter as soon as he could pop them.
"But that's amazing!" I said. "Some kind of wacky retail numerology. Odd numbers, huh? Why should that be?"
"Who knows?" said Kettle Corn Guy with a sneer. "Who cares? People are sheep. The important thing is that it works."
Kettle Corn Guy used to be a banker in Clovis before he became Kettle Corn Guy. I didn't get the full details of the apotheosis – I suspect heavy drinking was involved. He went to the University of Michigan on a football scholarship. After that, he went to the even more ultra-liberal U.C. Berkeley and that experience scarred him so severely that now he has to listen to Rush Limbaugh eight hours a day. He pays to download archives off the Internet!
Of course, kettle corn is the ultimate retail commodity – a product that's absolutely irresistible, whose cost of goods is so low that you can literally jack up the sales price by a factor of a hundred and still make a profit.
Not that Kettle Corn Guy doesn't have his own private despair. For a while he dreamed of his own supermarket empire – kettle corn with his picture on the wrapper smiling benignly down at shoppers from Safeway and Win-Dixie shelves across America! He invested all his profits in the endeavor. Alas, it was not to be: kettle corn has a shelf life of approximately four days; after that it turns into something whose taste resembles buttered Styrofoam peanuts. His empire crumbled before its first successful invasion. Kettle Corn Guy was forced to sell his packaging plant to some Mexicans who wanted to use it for making tortillas. Today he hates all Mexicans – which is ironic because they're his biggest customers. Ah, the delicate ecology of love and hate…
Also, yesterday, Lance Armstrong came into the store. I knew it was Lance because it looked just like him plus he was flanked by the two most enormous white guys I had ever seen. Bodyguards. Lance didn't buy anything (loser!) but he did stop to comment how he had seen the original of the Sanskrit health posters we sell painted on a wall over a urinal in India.
"First of all, people don't go into spaces with low ceilings," Kettle Corn Guy said. "If they have to duck, forget about it. They won't go inside.
"And another thing – if it takes someone longer than five seconds to figure out what you're selling, he won't buy it. So you've got to have signs."
The last was the best though: "You want to use odd numbers as price points. People don't buy things when they cost even numbers."
To illustrate this point, he shared the instructive tale of how when he first started out on the Fair circuit, he used to price his bags of kettle corn at $3, $4 and $5. The $4 bag never moved. So then he jacked the price of that one up to five bucks, jacked the five buck bag up to seven and voila! the bags started running off the counter as soon as he could pop them.
"But that's amazing!" I said. "Some kind of wacky retail numerology. Odd numbers, huh? Why should that be?"
"Who knows?" said Kettle Corn Guy with a sneer. "Who cares? People are sheep. The important thing is that it works."
Kettle Corn Guy used to be a banker in Clovis before he became Kettle Corn Guy. I didn't get the full details of the apotheosis – I suspect heavy drinking was involved. He went to the University of Michigan on a football scholarship. After that, he went to the even more ultra-liberal U.C. Berkeley and that experience scarred him so severely that now he has to listen to Rush Limbaugh eight hours a day. He pays to download archives off the Internet!Of course, kettle corn is the ultimate retail commodity – a product that's absolutely irresistible, whose cost of goods is so low that you can literally jack up the sales price by a factor of a hundred and still make a profit.
Not that Kettle Corn Guy doesn't have his own private despair. For a while he dreamed of his own supermarket empire – kettle corn with his picture on the wrapper smiling benignly down at shoppers from Safeway and Win-Dixie shelves across America! He invested all his profits in the endeavor. Alas, it was not to be: kettle corn has a shelf life of approximately four days; after that it turns into something whose taste resembles buttered Styrofoam peanuts. His empire crumbled before its first successful invasion. Kettle Corn Guy was forced to sell his packaging plant to some Mexicans who wanted to use it for making tortillas. Today he hates all Mexicans – which is ironic because they're his biggest customers. Ah, the delicate ecology of love and hate…
Also, yesterday, Lance Armstrong came into the store. I knew it was Lance because it looked just like him plus he was flanked by the two most enormous white guys I had ever seen. Bodyguards. Lance didn't buy anything (loser!) but he did stop to comment how he had seen the original of the Sanskrit health posters we sell painted on a wall over a urinal in India.
