Tag: idea

eating while your wife shops

As I mentioned in the last post, I was recently in Branson with the in-laws on vacation for a weekend, and I knew the women would be doing some shopping.  There’s a few outlet malls there, plus the newer promenade mall.  I can take only so much shopping, unless it’s for electronics or games.

I was talking about this with one of my friends, and he had an interesting suggestion for something I could do while the women are shopping:

Find an all-you-can-eat buffet and try to make a day of it. If your wife mentions that you probably don’t need to eat that much, you can always reference the fact that she probably doesn’t really need to shop that much either. Tell her that the sooner she gets back from shopping to pick you up, that is the sooner you will stop eating.

I like this idea.  It would tie-in with the idea of the last post where a store offers an atmosphere for men along with lots of nachos and other good eats.  But even without such a place, there are plenty of all-you-can-eat restaurants in Branson.  If my wife thinks I should eat less to help me lose weight, she can shop less, which will save money.  So it’s a win-win situation!

I mentioned this idea to my wife, but she failed to see the logic of it…

a store for men is needed

Recently I was on vacation in Branson, and one day the women were shopping at the different outlet malls.  Every time I find myself in this situation, I wonder why someone doesn’t open a store for men.  There is occasionally a tools store, but I still don’t want to spend all day there.  Even if I were to shop for clothes, it wouldn’t take very long.  (That’s just one of the areas where men and women are generally different.)

What I’m thinking of is a place where you can rent recliners for naps or to watch sports or play video games and/or eat nachos.  I think there’s a market for it.  I could justify spending a few dollars to do that while women look at clothes for hours.  Maybe we should open one — I’m certain we could make it awesome.

We could also sell new versions of the equipment in there — TVs, game consoles, games, recliners, etc., and have it delivered.  And we could sell off the used equipment at discount when it’s time to replace it.  If people can play video games, you’d surely sell some of them.  If necessary, you could occasionally show ads targeted at men, like for sports cars, tools, video games, action movies, flamethrowers, etc.  Ideally you wouldn’t have to show ads, but still, I could tolerate a few if it meant spending a few hours watching sports or playing video games instead of sitting around.

marketing with warm cookies

I was recently in the Denver, Colorado, area for a week, and I stayed two nights at a Comfort Inn.  When I first arrived and checked in, I was impressed by a basket filled with warm cookies, including the chocolate-chip variety.  That makes a great first impression!  Sadly, the cookies had limited availability at other times, sometimes with no basket there whatsoever.  It appears you just had to be lucky to be there when there were cookies.

I realize having a cookie buffet will result in some customers taking multiple cookies, some even hoarding some for later, but surely the value of positive word-of-mouth (such as this) would be much greater than the cost of a few cookies!  So why don’t more places do this?

Imagine how great the world would be if more places offered warm cookies for free…

teaching students with explosions

I had lunch the other day with the Buffet o’ Blog staff, and we always have some crazy conversations.  (If only more of them made it to the blog… perhaps we need an secretary to keep notes.)  Somehow we got on the topic of those secret messages in spy movies that at the end say:

“This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds.”

What if we applied that concept to learning in school?  Say once a student learning something, the message would explode, whether it was a paper, book, or chalkboard.  That would make learning fun!  Kids would be excited about learning new stuff then!

Obviously public school aren’t going to apply this technique because of “safety concerns” and cost.  So maybe we need to start our own private school where we teach with explosions and cool weapons.  It would be prohibitively expensive, and the disclaimer would be quite extensive (even more so than the disclaimer for this blog!).  But the students would be excited about going to school.

I’m convinced that people enjoy learning if you make it fun and interesting.  (I could’ve worded that “people enjoy learning if you make it enjoyable”.)  School should be more fun, I think.  I certainly learned more with the fun teachers . We would also use video games to teach students — some school is already doing that successfully.  If they can learn something while saving the world, everyone wins.