Monday, August 15, 2005

a nation of millions

Three or four years ago, the Nabob and I went out to dinner and talked about the part in Fast Food Nation, where the author goes to the lab that manufactures artificial smells. Back then, we had such a good idea (or maybe its bad and I shouldn’t share this) that I wrote it down in a draft email and saved it. Word for word from 2002:

Why don’t large corporations, lets take McDonalds and the Gap, build a partnership based on smells? McDonalds will have their employees uniformed in only Gap brand polo shirts, and in turn the Gap will release the manufactured smell of cheeseburgers in their store every once in a while, not enough to be overpowering, but just enough so that people are singing the special sauce song and immediately hit the drive-thru after buying a pair of flat-front khakis!


Do companies do this yet? Was I as stupid then as I am now, or are/were we untapped captains of industry?

Internets, I need to know.

3 comments:

topic15 said...

For a while, back when movie theaters would use subliminal messages by cutting a single frame (1/24 of a second image I believe) of a coke or bag of popcorn into a movie, they would also pump in the smell of buttered popcorn. Now they guilt/threaten you into purchases as "the rock" commands you to buy the will rodgers combo or he will lay the smackdown on your candy ass as your lack of donations results in little timmy's cancer.

Anonymous said...

this is actually a frighteningly plausible idea. we might have to move the scheduled revolution up a few years.

The Governess said...

barter system!