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Waiting in line at Wal-Mart the other day, I noticed that the beef jerky business appears to be on a major upswing. Ninth in line at the checkout, I knew I was going to have plenty of time to study the bountiful display next to my cart, because the befuddled cashier in the distance exhibited less movement than one can observe in an old Dutch oil painting.
I confess that I am "out of it" when it comes to the latest in beef jerky developments. I thought I was keeping up with the times when I switched to turkey jerky after reaching the age of 40. Let's just say it was part of a health kick I was on. But who knew you could now get teriaki jerky, cayenne jerky, and Tijuana Mama jerky that advertises it's a full "300 percent hotter?" I wondered if raising the pepper level by increments of 300 percent rather a bold stroke, wouldn't you say? - was the norm in the beef jerky trade, prompted by customer complaints about how they could "still feel their tongue."
Wouldn't it be great if the wallpaper biz were flourishing as much as the highly spiced meat byproduct/fat market? Unfortunately, as it concerns wallpaper sales, they still remain flat.
I often ponder what the numbers really are in the wallpaper business. You would figure this would be an easy thing to discover. Compared, say, with General Motors or GE, the whole output of the wallpaper industry is small potatoes. When GM types appear on those Wall Street cable shows, they seem to know everything there is to know about their business, like how many units were sold this year compared to last, what imports are competing with their own market niches, and what sort of damage imports are doing to domestic sales. In short, they have all sorts of important numbers at their fingertips that make the eyes of disinterested viewers glaze over.
Being a stockholder, I love it when corporations take the bull by the horns and treat marketing as if they were in a war. I can imagine Dr. Strangelove-type Command Central Rooms, with endless polished mahogany boardroom tables and large maps of the U.S. with little flagged pins stuck...