Marketing These Tough Times

Have you noticed how we’re being advertized to these days? Just the other night, Archie and I were watching TV and on came a commercial for some cheap restaurant saying essentially: you don’t have much money these days so come try our $5 meals. I’m sorry, that’s just sad. Corporate marketing is all over These Tough Times, too. There’s one profitable company I know that’s taken to promoting that “this economy is going to separate the winners from the losers.” How offensive is that?

I believe that most large corporations have been opportunistically increasing their own wealth over the past six to nine months and hiding those actions under a cloak of economic hardship. I’m not saying that the economy doesn’t suck, but I am saying that perhaps our economic engines could batten down the hatches some, hold on to their workforces, and see what happens rather than shedding jobs willy nilly while simultaneously increasing share price for their stockholders. And I think our government should hold these Titans of Commerce accountable for the worsening of the economy that they’re causing by adding to the ranks of the unemployed.

Even as I type these words, I see collective eyes rolling up into collective sockets. Oh, Mary, don’t be so naïve. Next you’ll be talking about Society with a capital S and wearing love beads. But really, pals, isn’t a culture, especially a thriving, sophisticated culture like we Americans like to think we have, about more than Social Darwinism? Call me a pinko commie if you like but it really doesn’t seem extreme to me at all to ask our business community to extend some compassion to their workers. To perhaps hold off on expectations of constant increased profitability and growth while our economy rights itself. Instead we have impatient, greedy corporations taking from the poor to give to the rich [remember my pay cut and the company’s uptick in profitability?] and laying people off without conscience. All the while telling each other that they’re the strong ones; those jobless folks were too weak to make it anyhow.

Kids, perhaps I should get off my soap box and wipe the spittle from the corners of my mouth.

What do you think?