The New Boredom

Now I went through 4 years of rigorous babysitting and was rewarded with my sweet Arts & Crafts degree, so I’m no business student, but I’d like to think that I could just as easily be a moderately intelligent monkey in a suit all the same.

It seems to me that “business” is just a fancy pants, made up word for the act of tricking people with money out of said money. And who has money these days? Hipsters. By definition, one of the prerequisites to being hip is having the money to afford the minimum fifty new trends per week. Have you ever seen a poor person and thought, “Hey, they sure look cool, let’s dress/act/eat like that!” Of course you haven’t (though surely some Hipsters do think this way). There’s no glamor in beat up shoes, picking your nose, and eating ramen 9 times a week.

Tricking a hipster out of their money once seems quite simple. Fishing with dynamite simple. But getting a hipster to keep coming back and fork over ample moneys in perpetuity is the hard part. But even that seems relatively easy to me. Just make them feel empowered over their purchases. Hipsterism depends on a certain degree of bittersweet democracy anyways. In order for something to be cool, it has to be popular. But in order for something to be really cool, it must also be fresh so it’s popularity is doomed for a short lifespan and must be replaced quickly.

Enter: Threadless. The sheer common sense genius of this company is unrivaled in both its genius and common senseness in the suited monkey business world. They empower the masses by allowing them to determine what designs get run on the next batch of tee shirts. You voted for it, they run it, you buy it. It’s basic drug dealer economics. You come back next week because your shirt you just got is showing up all over music shows and coffee shops all over town, and so you need a new one. Their profit margins are huge as they pay the winning designs peanuts (but subsidize the contaminated peanuts with 15 seconds of internet design fame), the blank shirts are cheap as dirt (cheaper in some cases, have you seen the cost of potting soil lately? yikes.), and the screens are easy to make. Shipping is passed off to the customer often, and the next thing you know, blam-o, $30 million in annual revenues with an insanely high profit margin.

Enter: Democracy’s Failure. I was a member of the Threadless community for a while about 5 or 6 years ago. I tried to look up my customer number but got pissed off at the site when my log in didn’t work. So screw it, just trust me that I was up in the first few thousand members (not to boast or anything). Now that Threadless has exploded, the voting base of customers has proved to have little to no taste in design, typography, or illustration. The shirts that get run now are pretty much crap. But people will buy the shit out of them because that’s what they want; they just told you so by voting for it. And now Threadless is making a ton of money off selling you some poop to smear all over your torso.

Dang Y’all.

Bleh.

Now that’s what I call business.

You know… I had an idea like that once… a lot time ago.

Oh yeah Bill, what was that?

It’s a jump… to conclusions mat…

But seriously, who wants to help me write up a load proposal for The Ruined Jeans Store (patent pending sucker fool) idea that I’ve been sitting on for the last 8 years? Any monkey-in-suit students out there want to help me get that crap off the ground? Just wait until we have to tell the bankers that they will be giving us money to produce the Micheal J Fox Bobble-Hands dashboard doll (but it’s cool, we’ll give much of the profits to Parkinson’s research… jeez, I’m not that much of a prick). The banker’s will be aghast and ask us to please leave. But then we’ll just say “How is that any dumber than gambling tens of billions of dollars a year on buying  houses for people with no verifiable income?” and they will pause and eventually reply, “How much money are we talking here for this loan?”

See, I told you I could be a moderately intelligent monkey in a suit.

Gunther from a great Futurama episode.