Humor gets us through

by Larry Meyer
MRA Chairman and CEO

“A guy walks into a store...”

Okay, maybe I don’t know any jokes that start that way, but that doesn’t mean there’s no humor in retail. Most retailers can remember more than a few funny retail situations or have applied their wit to the ironies around them.

What is there to laugh about when so many retail stores are struggling? In uncertain or rough times, humor may be more important than when everything is great.

Humor is a stress management technique that goes back to the Stone Age, and scientific studies have shown that a good laugh really does lower stress levels and contribute to overall health.

An image of a store sign being circulated through e-mail reads: “Unattended children will be given a cup of espresso and a free puppy.” Doesn’t that perfectly capture the frustration retailers feel about parents who treat their store as a daycare center?

Humor has long been an essential weapon in the marketing and advertising arsenal as well. Consider how many of the best ads run during the Super Bowl are funny, and about the water-cooler conversations about them the next day.

For humorous product descriptions, check out an offbeat e-commerce website known as Woot (www.woot.com). Woot gets a huge number of visitors each day who click just to read the wacky product descriptions.

Today’s product on Woot is an outdated game console that hooks up to a television and and offers either NHL ’95 or John Madden Football ’95.

“There’s something for everyone in here,” the product description reads. “For sophisticated sports fans who appreciate the skill, speed, creativity and athleticism of ice hockey, there’s NHL ’95. For slower-witted, antisocial brutes who prefer to get their kicks watching dangerously outsized ‘athletes’ repeatedly lining up and colliding for three hours, there’s Madden Football ’95.”

A timely dose of humor reminds us all not to take things too seriously. It’s not that bad news isn’t real or important, but perspective is everything.

So check out a new feature we’ll be running on this page—a new nationally syndicated comic strip called Retail. Its creator, Norm Feuti, is a Massachusetts retail management veteran of 15 years.

Now, I’m as new to this comic strip as you are, but according to the strip’s marketing materials, it presents a “hilarious look at the retail industry by chronicling the daily events at the fictitious Grumbel’s department store. Retail will play-out through the day-to-day trials and triumphs of four main Grumbel’s department store employees and the customers they encounter.”

The strip has a unique marketing twist, and here’s where you come in. By visiting the comic strip’s website (www.retailercomic.com), retail workers and customers alike can share their own humorous retail experiences. Some of these stories and anecdotes may be used and credited in a future Retail strip.

If you do submit a funny story to Retail, let us know so we can watch for something like it in the strip.