As I walk through our city’s department stores and shops this festive season, I can’t help feeling a pang of painful sympathy for all those brave folk who work in them.
You see, in my student Christmas holidays I worked as an assistant in a men’s clothing retailer. It was an old fashioned store with timber product drawers and mannequins that looked like they had been modelled on The Follies of '36.
But the owner did allow himself one touch of modernity. An eight-track audio system. No, not a multi-channel mixer, these were the bulky packs that preceded the cassette tape. They had a length of about an hour and automatically started again when set for “repeat”.
For Christmas he had two tapes, with carols and Christmas songs. And they played from opening time to final close, continuously.
After a while it became a version of the Chinese water torture. Drip drip drip - merry - drip - jingle - drip - shepherds - aargh!
So yes, my friends in the retail stores, I do know what you are going through right now, and you even have to pretend to be happy and festive in the process.
Obviously they have the same problem in Sweden. And a retailer has cleverly made a promotion out of it.
The electronics store Pause is running a promotion called “Xmas Carol Torture!” And the first prize is a stereo system. To win it, however, you have to face the music.
Their web site (xmascaroltorture.com) plays a jolly version of Jingle Bells, in English. Continuously. The winner will be the soul who lasts longest watching the screen and listening to the carol.
Oh you can’t skive off and leave the computer running. Every minute or so a santa head on the screen laughs “Ho ho ho!” and you have to quickly click it with your mouse. When I looked at the site someone had made it to over two hours. I lasted about four minutes.
This technique can be used with interactive TV, as Burger King did in the US recently, with a campaign called “Whopper Lust”.
You had to sit in front of a dedicated channel on Direct TV, which for a week showed only a flame-grilled burger slowly turning on screen. The challenge was, watch this burger for five minutes and get one free. Watch it for ten minutes and you get two.
Presumably they believe that the spinning stack of bun, meat and tomatoes will hypnotise you into an insatiable desire for the burger.
Maybe they were right - more than 50,000 burgers were won during 13,500 hours of TV advertising. Once again you had to click in response to prompts or else you would be returned to the start. Obviously some people have nothing better to do with their time.
In my supermarket the PA system continuously plays “Woolworths the fresh food people”. This is a rather lovely song. Until you have been in the store for the umpteenth time this month and you hear it wafting down the aisles even as you pick up a trolley.
My silent sympathy goes out to those poor souls who know that every morning of their working lives they will be greeted by that jolly voice - and that it won’t stop ‘till they have clocked off.
I have to plead guilty myself. One jingle I created long ago was “Food Plus your store with more”, and every time I visited one of the convenience stores it would be tinnily chirping from the ceiling. Even though it was my own baby, after a while I would have happily thrown a boot at the loudspeaker.
ray@ebeatty.com
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