Stupid is the new smart: Diesel attempts to create more fools to part from their money

I was flipping through some silly magazine in the waiting room at the Toronto Sleep Clinic when I came across the most peculiar advertisement. It featured what appeared to be a man in goofy looking sneakers approaching a urinal, his pants-less “girlfriend” piggy-backing him and apparently reaching for his fly. As if he were too drunk to piss on his own but not too drunk not to fall to the ground breaking both their necks. The ad was for Diesel, and the caption at the bottom read: Be Stupid.

Perplexing. What company would want their brand associated with stupid people? I was intrigued enough to investigate a little further. It turned out, this ad was just a small part of a big-ass, controversial campaign. Behold:

http://www.diesel.com/be-stupid/

Diesel tells us in a little video of their grandiose plans to change the very definition of “stupid” to mean “bold” or “gutsy” and if we don’t get it we’re old and boring (ie- “smart”) and will die with all our dreams unrealized. They go on to show us pictures of attractive young people doing all manner of “stupid” things. They range from “oooh, she’s on a ladder and flashing a CCTV camera, how earth shattering!” to asinine to what could be shortlisted for this year’s Darwin Awards.

In one ad, we see (as far as a smart old square like me can tell) a guy cheating on his girlfriend (or maybe the reverse) and hiding his little piece on the side under the bed. Heroic, no? In another, a bikini-clad revolutionary pulls back her bottoms to photograph her vag while standing in front of a hungry lion. I find myself rooting for the lion  to “get her already before she has a chance to have unprotected sex and BREED!”

Be stupid, because goshums, thinking is HARD!

I half expect to see that caption under a shot featuring a bunch of gorgeous teens anxiously biting their fake nails  in the waiting room of a vd clinic.

Or some vaccuous hottie waking up from a night of glamorous binge drinking married to one of the Jersey Shore douchebags and suffering from highly stylized bed head.

Or a whole slew of sexy stupid people chainsawed to death by a masked serial killer because they thought it would be “stupid” to check out that abandoned mental hospital in the middle of the night on the anniversary of the murder of seventy-five children. All piled in a sexy and suggestive heap.

I wouldn’t be at all shocked if Diesel steals these ideas. And I will sue.

We all do stupid things, but 99% of the time it results in agony or the very least inconvenience. The coveted “stories” Diesel tells us  our stupidity will be rewarded with tend to be inane and interesting only to other stupid people.

Sure, it gets us to the website, but does it translate to sales? Can the truly stupid even afford whatever it is they actually sell after spending all their money on magic beans? Probably. But taking advantage of the  stupid people, while profitable, is just plain mean.

Besides, there is enough reckless stupidity in the world without such a slick and ever-present war on using one’s brains. I’m shocked they’re not spelling it “stoopid.” After all, the use of correct spelling and any sort of punctuation is for those sad, smart people. Why send us hurtling ever closer to an idiocracy just to sell us your shit? If you’re going to revolutionize our way of thinking, as you claim to be doing in your video, bloody hell at least encourage people to think.

Sure, go ahead and be stupid; the smart people will clean up your mess. Or you’ll all be eaten by lions.

Another tall-brained move for Starbucks

Starschmucks and I are not friends. Yes, it is because I used to work there.

I was running out of my unemployment benefits and I took a job as a barista (ie-coffee monkey) to keep me out of the poor house until I found another proper office job. I ended up staying a year and a half.

This was not because I enjoyed it there. That company seemed to go out if its way to fail to endear itself to me from Day 1.

Day 1 being the morning after seeing Sir Paul McCartney in concert and having little time to sleep before having to rise at 6:00 AM in order to make it my Orientation session at Charfucks Head Office way the hell out in North York. Way the hell out in comparison to Port Credit, where I lived at the time.

The folks at Head Office sent me home because my shirt was cream coloured instead of white. All newbs were expected to show up “in uniform” (black or tan pants and black or white shirt) and the slight coffee-coloured tinge to my shirt got me sent the hell back to Port Credit. They would not let me into the mandatory Orientation session, where we would not even be seen by the public, because of the non-colour of my shirt.

And the tone for the duration of my employment at Fivebucks was set.

I worked under three different managers in my time there. The first was trying to quit smoking and took his shakes and nicotine withdrawl out on his employees. Especially us coffee monkeys in-training who hadn’t learned all the barista secrets yet. The second was just out-right incompetent and caused the already sagging store morale to sag even more. Then the last, an ambitious lad more than a few years my junior. Along with the new assistant manager, they were a pair of young go-getters eager to put their stamp on this store. I can’t stand young go-getters in the least.

And there was lots of coffee politics and store-induced dramatic moments in between those managers. All those things combined made the decision to leave not very hard at all. Even though my move to another coffee shop (except this one was downtown) was only a lateral one, I’ve never regretted not sticking around trying to be promoted to Shift Supervisor.

It was not long after that when Starbucks started to experience its “problems.” The timing makes me think karma was at work there.

Starbucks was getting serious competition from other vendors who had quality beans to offer their patrons for peanuts in comparison. Where once it was considered sophisticated to frequent Dumbfucks, it now just made one look stupid to keep paying those outrageous prices for java. And on second thought, the giving the cup sizes questionable Italian names was more pretentious than sophisticated. Also, the whole economic meltdown.

Whole stores actually closed, where once there were two on every block and three in every non-white elephant mall.

And then they made this dumb move:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34925407/?GT1=43001

They’re raising the prices of their “bar drinks” (ie- the Frappucinos, caramel machiatos etc.) while drip coffee drinkers are getting a break on prices. Those whipped cream-topped blender coffee drinks are the only things that force most people to Shlubbucks anymore since quality drip coffee can be found even in crappy fast food joints now. And those are the items these clowns are raising the prices on.

I have absolutely no business training at all, but that sounds like kind of a bad decision.

I wouldn’t go back there if the sold the best Schadenfreude cake in the world.

Unless it was vegan, of course.