Speaker 1: Cutbooms.
Speaker 2: If you thought four hours a day, twelve hundred minutes
Speaker 2: a week was enough, think again. He's the last remnants
Speaker 2: of the old republic, a sole fashion of fairness. He
Speaker 2: treats crackheads in the ghetto gutter the same as the
Speaker 2: rich pill poppers in the penthouse. Wow to Clearinghouse of
Speaker 2: hot takes, break free for something special. The Fifth Hour
Speaker 2: with Ben Mallard starts right now in.
Speaker 3: The air everywhere The Fifth Hour with Me, Ben Mahler
Speaker 3: and Danny g Radio. You have come within earshot of
Speaker 3: this podcast. It is the twenty eighth day of November.
Speaker 3: We had Thanksgiving yesterday, a day of football.
Speaker 1: We have another game today.
Speaker 3: Black Friday kicks off later on today with the Eagles
Speaker 3: hosting the Chicago Bears. A programming note, it is our
Speaker 3: doorbuster special, Benny Versus the Penny. You can get my
Speaker 3: pick on the Bears and the Eagles. I know Lucky
Speaker 3: Tony is excited to watch that, and so is ferg
Speaker 3: Dog and Alf and all the regulars will be over
Speaker 3: there watching that as they waltz through life. So that
Speaker 3: content will be up later today. We'll have the full
Speaker 3: episode of Benny Versus the Penny I was gonna post
Speaker 3: it already, but my good friend Tom Looney in production
Speaker 3: Looney did not send me the copy of Benny Versus
Speaker 3: the Penny. It's actually in the can. It'll be up
Speaker 3: here later today. On this podcast, you've heard of the
Speaker 3: Great Battles. How about the Battle of Costco Hill. The
Speaker 3: Battle of Costco Hill, it's a revolutionary war story back
Speaker 3: in black and the word of the week.
Speaker 1: We'll start with this.
Speaker 3: So, as you go through life, there are certain checkpoints
Speaker 3: that you have to go through, and certain things that
Speaker 3: test your metal, that make you question whether the fellow
Speaker 3: human beings that you share this world with it's mortal coil,
Speaker 3: whether they know what they're doing, whether the all of
Speaker 3: society is hanging on by dental floss. Now, one of
Speaker 3: those moments happened to me earlier this week, the day
Speaker 3: before Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1: So I have two words for you. Costco Run. Now.
Speaker 3: I talk about Costco a lot. It's one of the
Speaker 3: things I do on a regular basis. So a lot
Speaker 3: of the stories that I tell you on this podcast
Speaker 3: are somehow related to Costco because I spend time at Costco.
Speaker 1: Now, I'm not.
Speaker 3: Talking about your random Tuesday afternoon meander where you sashchet
Speaker 3: your way around Costco and you eat a lot of
Speaker 3: samples and you might buy some double A batteries. Maybe
Speaker 3: you take a bag of pretzels or something like that.
Speaker 3: I'm talking about a Wednesday Costco trip, the day before Thanksgiving,
Speaker 3: the big one. This is where you get the Costco
Speaker 3: and it's like a religious revival.
Speaker 1: The day.
Speaker 3: The parking lot looks like an evacuation scene from Armageddon.
Speaker 3: They're loading up Noah's Arc, getting two of every animal,
Speaker 3: and the shopping carts move in this formation. These convoys
Speaker 3: like navy destroyers through the asphalt and the parking lot.
Speaker 3: And this is not shopping. This is a quest. It
Speaker 3: is a quest. So I got the text the reason
Speaker 3: I went on Wednesday. I got the text, can you
Speaker 3: grab a couple of pies and some dinner rolls for
Speaker 3: my work?
Speaker 1: I got a thing of things. My wife had.
Speaker 3: Sent this to me. Some of you know she's a
Speaker 3: nine to one to one operator and they have more
Speaker 3: events with food at police stations. So her job was
Speaker 3: to bring the pie and the roles. And since she
Speaker 3: was sleeping and I don't sleep very much. I'm only
Speaker 3: sleeping four or five hours a day, I guess I'll
Speaker 3: go out and go to the store.
Speaker 1: No problem.
Speaker 3: So I went out, did my thing and did the
Speaker 3: Costco trip again. This is the this is not the
Speaker 3: amateur one. And I went there and I had no map.
Speaker 3: You know, there's muscle memory. I didn't get a pep talk.
Speaker 3: I just had the outline of the mission, pie and
Speaker 3: dinner rolls, and the ominous sense that I might not return.
Speaker 1: This could be the end of me.
Speaker 3: I might be swallowed up into some kind of portal
Speaker 3: going to another dimension. It'll be a Kirkland brand dimension,
Speaker 3: and that could happen.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 3: So there's really no casual way to get the Costco.
Speaker 3: The day before Thanksgiving it felt like the NFL Combine.
Speaker 3: You know they do that thing in Indianapolis, the Underwear Olympics.
Speaker 3: Instead of the forty yard dash and the cone drill.
Speaker 3: People were competing in who can get through self checkout
Speaker 3: with without losing their sanity?
Speaker 1: Right, that old thing? Where do I find a shopping cart?
Speaker 1: There's none here? Where do I go?
Speaker 3: So, because they were all out in the parking lot,
Speaker 3: so I grabbed my metaphorical armor, my version of chainmail,
Speaker 3: the modern version, and I stormed through the sliding door
Speaker 3: into medieval times.
Speaker 1: If you will, I was like a medieval night.
Speaker 3: Just think of me as swashbuckling my way into the battlefield.
Speaker 3: I didn't have a sword. I had an iPhone and
Speaker 3: my Kirkland brand membership. Now, truth be told, Costco is undefeated.
Speaker 3: It doesn't just test your endurance like the New York Marathon.
Speaker 1: It abuses it.
Speaker 3: Suddenly you're buying garlic that the quantities of the garlic
Speaker 3: are large enough to provide relief to an entire continent
Speaker 3: somewhere in Africa. And you walk in for two items
Speaker 3: and you leave in for somehow you're like in an
Speaker 3: inflatable kayak that is the size of Rhode Island and
Speaker 3: enough toilet paper to last at least three, possibly four presidencies.
Speaker 3: Like you have that much. And so my first stop
Speaker 3: was to pick up the dinner rolls. I figured, this
Speaker 3: is no problem. How hard could this be? I can
Speaker 3: figure this out. And I'm guessing that even though it's
Speaker 3: the day before Thanksgiving, this is not going to be
Speaker 3: a popular part of Costco.
Speaker 1: So I made my way.
Speaker 3: I knew, because I'm a Costco veteran, I knew where
Speaker 3: the dinner rolls were aisle forty seven B. Everyone knows
Speaker 3: the gold standard when it comes to a dinner roll
Speaker 3: is a Hawaiian role. It's sweet, it's soft, it's got
Speaker 3: the pillowy carbs there. It's a gift from the gods.
Speaker 3: It's really not the nectar of the gods. It's the
Speaker 3: bread of the gods. But here's something I've long argued
Speaker 3: on the radio. I got married in Hawaii. I've been
Speaker 3: to Hawaii many times. I love the Hawaiian islands. The
Speaker 3: people are great, wonderful, the scenery is amazing. It's the
Speaker 3: most beautiful place I've ever been is the Nepali coast
Speaker 3: on Kawaii.
Speaker 1: It's amazing, just absolute paradise.
Speaker 3: However, there's something that is not right about Hawaii is
Speaker 3: the food.
Speaker 1: I don't love it.
Speaker 3: I'll swim with the fish, However, I don't eat the fish,
Speaker 3: and that's a problem. That's a bit of a problem.
Speaker 3: I don't really care for spam. I'm not a spam guy,
Speaker 3: and I will make the exception with Hawaii Hawaiian roles.
Speaker 1: And I learned I was curious. I said, well, I
Speaker 1: wonder what island they're from.
Speaker 3: I thought, well, maybe they're from Kawaii and that's the
Speaker 3: island I got married and I was going to tell
Speaker 3: some big story and oh, by the way, these rolls
Speaker 3: have a sentimental meeting, now they don't. They Actually Hawaiian
Speaker 3: roles come from Portuguese immigrants who arrived in Hawaii in
Speaker 3: the late nineteenth century and brought their native recipes sweetbread
Speaker 3: recip he's with him from Portugal, and over time the
Speaker 3: bread got rebranded. Portugal made the dough. Why he got
Speaker 3: the credit, and it's bread essentially wearing an a loha skirt,
Speaker 3: and what's wrong with that?
Speaker 1: Nothing?
Speaker 3: And I'll tell you this, Costco stacks those rolls up
Speaker 3: like they're preparing for a delicious carbohydrate apocalypse. And I
Speaker 3: don't have a problem with that. Entire mountains man made
Speaker 3: mountains and would literally just bury a tesla, would just
Speaker 3: be buried in this. And then came the moment, the
Speaker 3: real test, the pie aisle. The Hawaiian role thing was
Speaker 3: that was child's play to my right, So imagine me.
Speaker 3: I'll get into the pie and it's really kind of
Speaker 3: near the bakery, so I don't know pie aisles the
Speaker 3: right way, but.
Speaker 1: It's still kind of aisles. So I get to the
Speaker 1: pie aisle.
Speaker 3: To my right, they have arranged apple pies, each one identical.
Speaker 3: It's synchronized. It's like in the Olympics synchronized swimmers. But
Speaker 3: this is the Dessert Olympics, not to be confused with
Speaker 3: the housekeeping Olympics, which we workshopped on this podcast a
Speaker 3: few weeks ago. To my left, so I've got to
Speaker 3: my right, I've got the apple pies. To my left,
Speaker 3: this massive pumpkin pie display that at the time, it
Speaker 3: felt large enough to affect the gravitational pull, Like if
Speaker 3: I took the pumpkin pie out, I would somehow, you know,
Speaker 3: somebody would fall over in New Zealand because of that.
Speaker 3: And I saw one of them had its own weather system.
Speaker 3: It was that big, that big a pumpkin pie. And
Speaker 3: so I froze for a moment. I stared, and I
Speaker 3: debated in my head. Now this is a conversation I'm
Speaker 3: having in my head. I'm not having this out loud.
Speaker 3: I'm not talking about this out loud. So I'm like
Speaker 3: an apple pie, pumpkin pie, apple pie, pumpkin pie, apple pie,
Speaker 3: pumpkin pie, apple pie, pumpkin pie.
Speaker 1: What am I gonna do?
Speaker 3: And I was deep in thought when I saw, but
Speaker 3: not the spotlight, not the light from the gods, not
Speaker 3: center stage. Off to the side, like a backup singer
Speaker 3: at the Grammys, was a separate display peep pecan pie
Speaker 3: ding ding ding ding ding. Now, let me be very clear,
Speaker 3: for those of you in the back of the room,
Speaker 3: those of you that aren't paying close attention because you're
Speaker 3: doing the Honeydew List or you're just living your life,
Speaker 3: pecan pie is not just dessert. It's the unicorn of
Speaker 3: the pie world. It's a seasonal pie, which makes it rare,
Speaker 3: which makes it more valuable. Sometimes you'll get it for
Speaker 3: the Christmas season, barely see it where I am the
Speaker 3: rest of the year. You don't just buy pecan pie.
Speaker 3: Pecan pie chooses you. So I marched towards it. In
Speaker 3: my head, it was in slow motion, like a scene
Speaker 3: from that old baseball movie The Natural, and the music
Speaker 3: was playing, the sappy music was playing in my head,
Speaker 3: and I picked it up gently, like the scene from
Speaker 3: The Lion King when they lifted Simba there and I whispered,
Speaker 3: you're coming home with Daddy, And then I tossed an
Speaker 3: apple pie and a pumpkin pie into the cart for
Speaker 3: my wife's office office office police station thing. The Thanksgiving
Speaker 3: deal because you know, again, I don't do lists, as
Speaker 3: you know, Terry and England knows that we don't do
Speaker 3: this on this podcast, but we do do Big Benz
Speaker 3: Big Pie Board where every pie has its lane. Now,
Speaker 3: I'm not going to include the King of all pies,
Speaker 3: Banana cream pie, because that was not an option. I'm
Speaker 3: not going to give you Key Lime Pie, which is
Speaker 3: a very solid pie. I just had my key Lime
Speaker 3: Pie recently in the last year. Here a couple of
Speaker 3: them from our friend in Florida who sent those out.
Speaker 3: So on Big Ben's Big Pie Board where every pie
Speaker 3: has its lane, you've got got apple pie, which is
Speaker 3: the I call that the Swiss Army Knife of dessert.
Speaker 3: It's available year round. Every major restaurant has apple pie.
Speaker 3: You never have to worry about a supply chain shortage
Speaker 3: of apple pie. It's just always there when you live
Speaker 3: in America. Now, pumpkin pie has a short lifespan. It's
Speaker 3: kind of like the NC doublea men's basketball tournament, and
Speaker 3: it goes some selection Sunday and really kind of interest
Speaker 3: wanes after the first weekend of the men's basketball tournament,
Speaker 3: then picks up again for the final four. But the
Speaker 3: pumpkin pie from relatively say October fifteenth through possibly January first,
Speaker 3: it's a seasonal pie. Now, pecan pie is like that
Speaker 3: rare comet that flies across the holidays. Guys, you never
Speaker 3: really know when it's going to be available, other than
Speaker 3: possibly around Christmas. So I got everything, and at checkout,
Speaker 3: I then got a body blow, body blow, a gut punch.
Speaker 3: You want to take a guess how much the three
Speaker 3: pies and the dinner rolls cost me?
Speaker 1: Ding ding ding ding ding.
Speaker 3: Yeah, three pies and a bag of Hawaiian rolls cost
Speaker 3: me seventy dollars. Now, look, I am not saying I
Speaker 3: expect to get some kind of overnight talk radio discount
Speaker 3: or a military discount or any kind of discount. I
Speaker 3: just thought for seventy bucks, I should have at least
Speaker 3: gotten a back massage, shoulder rub, maybe a whisper like, hey,
Speaker 3: you're doing great over there, We thank you.
Speaker 1: How about a puppy.
Speaker 3: I would have liked a puppy, or but no, you
Speaker 3: swipe the card at the self checkout and you move
Speaker 3: a long soldier and don't look back. Inflation, my friends,
Speaker 3: you're dealing with the same stuff I'm doing.
Speaker 1: With is undefeated.
Speaker 3: And those pies rang up like they were being hand
Speaker 3: crafted at a bakery that's been around since the sixteen
Speaker 3: hundreds in Peri, and then flown in not coach but
Speaker 3: first class to America from Zimbabwe. So they started in Perie,
Speaker 3: they went to Zimbabwe and then made their way back
Speaker 3: to the States. Now in the moment, I thought, well,
Speaker 3: this is insanity, this is ky, this is Costco and
Speaker 3: again we were talking about the event is one of
Speaker 3: the great events in history, the Battle of Costco Hill.
Speaker 3: We're doing the Battle of Costco Hill and it's not easy.
Speaker 3: It's not easy to do the Battle of Costco Hill.
Speaker 3: And then I thought, well, this is Thanksgiving. This is
Speaker 3: what it's all about, right, small missions carried out by
Speaker 3: exhausted people or someone else who is out there and
Speaker 3: they need the help. And it's all about the meal.
Speaker 3: It's a war meal. Your dad, a husband, whatever, wife, teenagers, kids,
Speaker 3: and you do these errands and no one's gonna remember.
Speaker 1: That's the thing.
Speaker 3: You don't remember what you ate. Nobody will remember what
Speaker 3: brand of pie I bought, what size of pie I bought.
Speaker 3: Nobody will care where it was apple, pumpkin, or pecan.
Speaker 3: But they'll remember that there was pie and they showed
Speaker 3: up and I brought the pie to the table, and
Speaker 3: that's it. That's part of the Thanksgiving festivitus. Even though
Speaker 3: I did not partake in the apple or the pumpkin,
Speaker 3: did not do that.
Speaker 1: And there you go.
Speaker 3: Just another day meandering around Costco on a holiday, the
Speaker 3: day before a holiday. Now, speaking of that today is
Speaker 3: kind of a big deal. Back in black The things
Speaker 3: you should know about Black Friday, which is today, and
Speaker 3: it really is not about shopping. When you dig deep,
Speaker 3: it's about a subculture. It's about an identity. It's about belonging,
Speaker 3: and a lot of what we do in a lot
Speaker 3: of what we do is about belonging. It's about the
Speaker 3: only American religion you know, is we all practice right?
Speaker 3: A lot of people have different relgions. Some people aren't
Speaker 3: religious at all. Yeah, it's fine. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Whatever gets you through life, as long as don't just
Speaker 1: don't bother me. I'm not going to bother you.
Speaker 3: The thing that stands out though, the religion of America
Speaker 3: is consumerism, the great unifier, the soft anthem, the pledge
Speaker 3: of allegiance with a receipt at the end, and it.
Speaker 1: Began with panic, not pleasures.
Speaker 3: So the history of black Friday as a term the
Speaker 3: experts dated to eighteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: Hello, eighteen sixty nine.
Speaker 3: It was used to describe an economic disaster, a gold
Speaker 3: speculation scandal that rocked Wall Street and left these monstrosities.
Speaker 1: These newspapers searching.
Speaker 3: For a word to capture the carnage, and the newspapers
Speaker 3: came up with this word, which was dark and ominous
Speaker 3: and unstable, and that's what they came up with, black Friday.
Speaker 3: Now you fast forward to the nineteen fifties and Philadelphia,
Speaker 3: so we're talking about eighty some years after the initial
Speaker 3: black Friday was used, and this was in Philadelphia. Police
Speaker 3: used the same phrase, but they used it to describe
Speaker 3: this nightmre shopping situation post Thanksgiving, with traffic everywhere, pickpockets,
Speaker 3: crowds behaving like animals. It was not a celebration. It
Speaker 3: was crowd control. And the cops in Philadelphia called it
Speaker 3: black Friday, and they had to deal with all these
Speaker 3: people who were out of control because they wanted to
Speaker 3: get a deal on products. And so naturally, in this country,
Speaker 3: the one that can take a headache and turn it
Speaker 3: into a holiday. Did what we always do. We monetized
Speaker 3: Black Friday. We said, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is chaos,
Speaker 3: but we can sell a lot of crap, and we
Speaker 3: want to sell a lot of crap because America does
Speaker 3: not believe in bad ideas, only unbranded ideas.
Speaker 1: That's it.
Speaker 3: And so retailers. It started in Philadelphia, but they flipped
Speaker 3: the narrative. They said, oh, okay, you guys misunderstand Black Friday.
Speaker 3: The black part is not some kind of calamity. Black
Speaker 3: is about profit. It means we're in the black. You're
Speaker 3: in the red, you're losing money, you're in the black.
Speaker 1: That's great.
Speaker 3: This day is not disorder, it is economic rebirth.
Speaker 1: Halllelujah, hallelujah.
Speaker 3: And just like that in exorcism, a linguistic exorcism occurred.
Speaker 3: Black no longer meant danger, it meant deals. Graphic designers added,
Speaker 3: sparkle ads cheered, the crowd arrived, chaos was.
Speaker 1: No longer going on. And so that was the tradition.
Speaker 3: It was a tradition, and that's the American special, not reinvention.
Speaker 3: You just reframed stuff. And as I've gone through life,
Speaker 3: you learn certain things. It's the same reason when I
Speaker 3: was a kid, made in Japan was synonymous with cheap,
Speaker 3: and I heard this from my parents and relatives and
Speaker 3: all that because it was after World War Two.
Speaker 1: You know, I was born way after World War Two.
Speaker 3: But the phrase made in Japan was synonymous for cheap
Speaker 3: in the nineteen forties, and by the time I was
Speaker 3: a kid, and it had changed in the engineering excellence
Speaker 3: of Japan. By the nineteen eighties, it became synonymous with
Speaker 3: good things. It's the same reason bad became praise after
Speaker 3: Michael Jackson moonwalked that phrase into the dictionary. The same
Speaker 3: reason underdog once meant loser in a dog fight. Now
Speaker 3: it's the most beloved arc in sports. Oh, an underdog.
Speaker 3: Everyone loves the underdog. Words don't change. They do not
Speaker 3: change the words. You repeat something enough and eventually it
Speaker 3: becomes true. And phrases, and we lived in a period
Speaker 3: where people try to redefine phrases and things like that.
Speaker 1: It's a messy situation. Now.
Speaker 3: If you watch a department store at four in the
Speaker 3: morning on Black Friday, it's no longer a store.
Speaker 1: It has become theater.
Speaker 3: A running back darting through a linebacker through the a
Speaker 3: gap and then getting dog piled. Is no different than
Speaker 3: a shopper sprinting down the left side, turning right and
Speaker 3: then going fast and then turning left because that's where
Speaker 3: they want to get to the target aisle for the
Speaker 3: last seventy inch Samsung television, which is fifty five percent off.
Speaker 3: But only that, only this day, because America on Black
Speaker 3: Friday today stops being a country and becomes a checkout line.
Speaker 3: We call it shopping in quotes, but be honest, it
Speaker 3: feels more like hunting. It feels like you're on a
Speaker 3: scavenger hunt. People don't browse, they stalk. They camp out
Speaker 3: like pilgrims on asphalt. They rush the doors like a
Speaker 3: jail break. And this is not merely commerce. This is chemistry,
Speaker 3: is what it is. It's a dopamine surge disguised as patriotism,
Speaker 3: helping the American economy. It also teaches the one rule
Speaker 3: that has quietly shaped our entire culture. If everyone else
Speaker 3: wants something, you must want it to You just have
Speaker 3: to want it again. It's not this one's not capitalism.
Speaker 3: It's social survival is what it is. And human beings
Speaker 3: are grammable. You learn that as you get through life,
Speaker 3: you like to think, Oh no, I'm not programmable. Doctor
Speaker 3: Seuss taught me. I'm one of one. You can't program me.
Speaker 3: But we don't really live in a democracy. We live
Speaker 3: in a brandocracy is what we live in. Because this
Speaker 3: works every year without fail, the crowd's return. I don't
Speaker 3: care how bad the economy is. I don't care about
Speaker 3: any of that. And it's not because you need a
Speaker 3: new microwave or discounted towels. It's because of three things.
Speaker 3: There's three triggers that are involved in this. You've got scarcity,
Speaker 3: which triggers the survival instinct. Scarcity of food, scarcity of
Speaker 3: toaster ovens, countdown. That's something they learned in the infomercial world,
Speaker 3: where you introduce panic disguised as urgency. You better shop.
Speaker 3: These deals are going away and they're never coming back.
Speaker 3: Oh mg, crowd participation now that replaces judgment with belonging.
Speaker 1: And so really this is the group mind.
Speaker 3: It's group think, the one that terrifies every man, woman
Speaker 3: and child, the one that confronts all of us, the
Speaker 3: one that we all swear we're not a part of.
Speaker 1: You might be, but I'm not.
Speaker 3: Even while we are filling up our cars. Now I
Speaker 3: don't take part in Black Friday. My wife she loves it. Right,
Speaker 3: the rise of online shopping, and you know that's big today,
Speaker 3: it's supercharged all of this. You enter cyber Monday, which
Speaker 3: is coming up here, and end of the week before sales,
Speaker 3: end of the last minute sales. You've got the month
Speaker 3: long shopping season today, fifty to sixty percent off. And
Speaker 3: countries globally now participate and start in America and some
Speaker 3: version of this around the globe. About fifty percent of
Speaker 3: the countries. Europe calls it Mega Sales Day. China does
Speaker 3: its own thunderous version called Singles Day. November eleventh now
Speaker 3: the biggest shopping event on Earth. And Black Friday has
Speaker 3: gone global not because it sells products, because it sells validation.
Speaker 3: And Black Friday is the latest day long line of
Speaker 3: hypnotic tricks used by Madison Avenue. To me, the greatest
Speaker 3: of them all, by far, the greatest of them all
Speaker 3: was breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
Speaker 3: And every once in a while it will come up
Speaker 3: in conversation and I don't eat breakfast, but somebody will say, hey,
Speaker 3: you gotta get breakfast. You'll be on baking. We gotta
Speaker 3: get breakfast. Why are we gonna get breakfast? Well, it's
Speaker 3: the most important meal of today. And then of course
Speaker 3: I become the douche if I bring this up and
Speaker 3: I say, you know that phrase breakfast is the most
Speaker 3: important meal of today. That's not a medical consensus, it's
Speaker 3: not scientifically based. Cereal companies, Kellogg's, they didn't just create breakfast.
Speaker 3: They created guilt, parental guilt. Are you are you feeding
Speaker 3: your kids the fuel they need for school? Are you
Speaker 3: raising a future champion? That That wasn't advice. That was
Speaker 3: salesmanship and a lab coat. You put people on television
Speaker 3: and lab coats and oh my god, we better listen
Speaker 3: to these people said well, no, it's actually bull crap.
Speaker 1: No, but we better listen. It's very important. They look
Speaker 1: like they know what they're doing.
Speaker 3: And before that slogan, people did not did not really
Speaker 3: eat breakfast that much.
Speaker 1: If they ate breakfast, it was just leftover some the
Speaker 1: night before.
Speaker 3: And then after that it changed, It changed a lot,
Speaker 3: and it's like, okay, now and now we got something.
Speaker 3: You know, breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
Speaker 3: Another one of those phrases, diamonds are forever or a
Speaker 3: diamond is forever the for words from de Beers in
Speaker 3: the nineteen forties, and suddenly every every single proposal required
Speaker 3: a diamond.
Speaker 1: Oh, you gotta do it, a diamond ring.
Speaker 3: And before that, before nineteen forty seven, rings were pretty
Speaker 3: modest or nonexistent. After that without a diamond, like, what
Speaker 3: kind of loser are you? You don't have a diamond.
Speaker 3: They didn't just sell jewelry. They sold legitimacy is what
Speaker 3: they sold. They sold that as well. The shopping cart
Speaker 3: is another great example. People did not like shopping carts
Speaker 3: when they started, and started in Oklahoma City. So what
Speaker 3: they did is they hired hot women and attractive men
Speaker 3: and they had paid them to walk around the store
Speaker 3: with the shopping carts even though they weren't buying anything.
Speaker 3: And the reason they did that is because the other
Speaker 3: customers saw it and they said, well, these are that
Speaker 3: woman's really hot. I better I want to know what
Speaker 3: she's doing. And then the women looked at the men's
Speaker 3: Oh that guy's handsome. I got to find out what
Speaker 3: I mean that shopping cart. I might want to get
Speaker 3: one of those. And so that's how that began. Black
Speaker 3: Friday is not about discounts. It's about again identity. It
Speaker 3: asks do you belong in the tribe? Are you part
Speaker 3: of the right tribe. If the answer is yes, you'll
Speaker 3: chase the sale because belonging beats logic every.
Speaker 1: Time, and so it's it's the truth. It's not flat,
Speaker 1: it's not flattering.
Speaker 3: America does not want things as much as we want
Speaker 3: the feeling of wanting things. It's buyer's remorse for so
Speaker 3: much of this stuff. The chase is the thrill, The
Speaker 3: KRT is the adventure. The only two left by now
Speaker 3: that's the drum beat. Of course, I'll let you in
Speaker 3: a little dirty secret, that a dirty little secret that
Speaker 3: a lot of those only two left things on the internet.
Speaker 1: Are bull crap. They are a bull crap.
Speaker 3: And anyway, when you arrive, some people still go to
Speaker 3: malls and stuff that want disappears, the thrill evaporates, we
Speaker 3: begin hunting again, just go hunting again. And nothing proves
Speaker 3: this more than the abandoned cart syndrome, the phenomena of
Speaker 3: millions of people loading digital carts and never checking out.
Speaker 1: Which is a thing right.
Speaker 3: People will put a bunch of stuff in the cart
Speaker 3: and then that's it, and they won't actually purchase it.
Speaker 1: But we're really not chasing products again, We're chasing purpose.
Speaker 1: That's what it is.
Speaker 3: And so Black Friday arrives every year like a spiritual audit,
Speaker 3: and it asks the same question, gently, powerfully, repeatedly, do
Speaker 3: we truly need all this stuff? Or do we just
Speaker 3: need to feel like we need this stuff and be part.
Speaker 1: Of the community.
Speaker 3: It's the busiest shopping day of the year. It's also,
Speaker 3: in many ways the loneliest question that hides inside it.
Speaker 3: Are we buying gifts? Or are we buying permission to matter?
Speaker 3: Black Friday? It's not on the calendar, it's in the bloodstream.
Speaker 2: It just is.
Speaker 1: And until we recognize that we won't own our own choices,
Speaker 1: they will own us.
Speaker 3: Now go off and bob bye bye bye bye, not
Speaker 3: bye bye baby.
Speaker 1: Go buy a toaster oven so you can make French toast.
Speaker 1: All right?
Speaker 3: Now for the word of the week, the word of
Speaker 3: the week, and the word of the week is avocado.
Speaker 1: Is the word of the week. This was sent to me.
Speaker 1: We get the name here. One second.
Speaker 3: This was sent by Dale, who is not related to Chip.
Speaker 3: I met a Dale in Syracuse whose Chip in Syracuse.
Speaker 3: This is not his blood relative his brother, and he said,
Speaker 3: Dale said, how about avocado? And I thought, well, I
Speaker 3: don't eat avocado, why would I want to worry about avocado?
Speaker 3: And then I realized I had the come to Jesus
Speaker 3: moment when I saw the origin of the word avocado.
Speaker 3: It goes back to the Aztecs, not the San Diego
Speaker 3: State as Techs, the actual Aztex and they called the
Speaker 3: fruit by their in their own language, a word which
Speaker 3: directly translates to both avocado and testicle.
Speaker 1: That's right, yes, that's right. Now.
Speaker 3: Scholars believe that the association came from the obvious oval
Speaker 3: shape and the resemblance to testicles, and the fact that
Speaker 3: avocados often grow in pairs hanging from the tree, and
Speaker 3: so you put all that in there. It reinforced this
Speaker 3: sexual connotation, and it was adopted. When the Spanish encountered
Speaker 3: the fruit, they adopted the Aztec in their language phrase,
Speaker 3: and over time it was reshaped into avocado and English,
Speaker 3: partly influenced by the similarity to the word advocate from
Speaker 3: Latin and in colonial English, avocados were sometimes called alligator
Speaker 3: pears alligator pairs, and the Aztecs considered avocados to be
Speaker 3: fertility boosters and gave you vitality, a working libido that
Speaker 3: goes to the roof.
Speaker 1: And so the meaning, the dual meaning.
Speaker 3: Of this ASTech word reflects how liosten things have multiple
Speaker 3: meanings all the time in life and certainly in our verbiage.
Speaker 1: And so the.
Speaker 3: Dual meaning was not unusual for the Aztec language. Words
Speaker 3: often carried layered meanings, we are told, blending physical resemblance
Speaker 3: with symbolic or cultural significance and all that. And so
Speaker 3: there it is the good job by Dale. The word
Speaker 3: of the week. Word of the week avocado. All right,
Speaker 3: This podcast is being produced by Danny G.
Speaker 1: Radio.
Speaker 3: Is a Danny G Radio production, so if you have
Speaker 3: any complaints, blame him.
Speaker 1: No, I'm kidding. We love Danny.
Speaker 3: Danny's having a great holiday weekend. We will get you
Speaker 3: on the next podcast tomorrow. And as Danny would say, later,
Speaker 3: skater asta pasta a riva da che.
Speaker 1: Oh that's he doesn't say that.
Speaker 3: Now he will edit that out on the point he
Speaker 3: does not say a riva dre cha. He does not
Speaker 3: do that, does not do that.
Speaker 1: Got a murder. I gotta go