“If you can find a laugh in this film, I’ll give you a shiny new dime for every one,” Ebert said. “And you’ll not become a rich man.”
[….] Roger Ebert held up a newspaper ad for the movie with a quote from the Village Voice calling it “the funniest anti-clerical transvestite comedy of the decade.”
“I know you’re a very clever man–I wonder if you can spot the fallacy,” Ebert quipped.
“How many others have there been?” Siskel asked.
“Yes, this is 1990. How many other transvestite, anti-clerical comedies have there been so far in this decade?” Ebert continued. 1
20th Cetury Fox was so angry by this that they banned the duo from attending previews of their movies. Siskel & Ebert was like, whatever and said that they would still discuss films from the studio, but not show clips of the movies.
You want to know how long that ban lasted? A whopping three weeks. 2
I remembered another boneheaded move by our pals at Sears. Previously, I had brought up Sears discontinuing its Big Book catalog years before online shopping became mainstream. This time its Sears thinking it was a good idea to close for 42 hours to reduce prices on thousands of items. In retail hours, that’s a long butt time.
Prep started early at some larger stores:
Six million inventory sheets. More than 20,000 pricing guns. At least 100 million blank pricing labels and about 140 million pre-printed ones. Thousands of in-store signs and displays. Thousands of additional part-time workers and untold amounts of coffee and gooey, sugary Danish to keep the workers` energy levels high.
Jim Eagan, manager of Sears at Oakbrook Center, oversees one of the largest outlets in the area. The first step was to count every item in the store, Eagan said.
Eagan`s workers will sort through more than 6,000 inventory sheets, each containing about 14 items. Each item will be counted, then re-ticketed with the new prices.
Then there`s all those spiffy new signs to hang.
“Headquarters sent us 18 large boxes containing new four-color signs for the store. Our regional office sent us 10 boxes of signs. They spent 1,232 hours making between 8,000 and 9,000 signs,” he said.
Workers stayed until 11 p.m. Sunday to count inventory in the apparel areas, Eagan said. “Tonight (Monday), we`ll count everything in hardlines-the appliances, automotive, recreational and leisure, paint and hardware.”
Because the turnaround must be completed quickly, Sears has added thousands of part-time workers to its payrolls. 1
One of several items that surprised me was how many workers worked at Sears stores back then. This is from a store in Florida:
George Harrigan, manager of the Altamonte Mall store, said the 42-hour chore of retagging the prices on more than 50,000 items was “a massive job. We hired between 75 and a hundred part-timers in addition to using our 350 to 375 regular employees. There was a lot of overtime. The conversion was very expensive.” Harrigan, however, said he was unable to estimate the cost of the changeover. 2
No wonder Sears was struggling even then. Hiring nearly 400 people for one store. This wasn’t Macys at Harold Square! George reminds me of another point: how much money Sears spent on the stores being closed for 42 hours and the signs and the extra work. I’ve read estimates of $100 million. 3
Of course there were complaints once the stores reopened at noon on March 1st:
″I think it might cheapen them a little bit, but they’re a grade higher than K mart,″ said Pam Cage, 31, one of about 3,000 shoppers who crowded a Sears store in Miami. 4
″Prices seem to be a little lower, but I don’t see a heck of a lot of difference,″ said one woman at the Holyoke, Mass., Sears who declined to give her name but described herself as a regular Sears shopper.
Lynn Carver of Barkhamsted, Conn., said she drove to a West Hartford Sears store to exchange some sheets and found the price was about 20 percent higher than the week before.
Operating Manager Larry Glowa said the sheets had been on sale last week and were not among the items reduced in price Wednesday. 4
But Thomas Hughes, a retired stagehand from Bayside, Queens, held up a Craftsman router, a woodworking power tool, and complained: “It’s $10 off. It should be at least $20 off.” 5
and you read those now, and you’re just like:
Kmart replied:
Barbara Palazzolo, spokeswoman for the 2,265-store K mart Corp., based in Troy, Mich., said the nation’s No. 2 retailer planned no immediate response to the Sears move. ″We’ve had everyday low prices for the past 27 years,″ she said. 4
“Pull my strong, okay, undo my felt, yeah, no, keep it quiet” oh, that joke wouldn’t fly in 2019.
“A high tech microchip included with each new Star Wars figure enabled Samuel Jackson’s character, Mace Windu to relive lines like, ‘Damn, Yoda!’ and ‘What’s up, Darth?’“
Jon muses, “SO I guess The Faculty wasn’t good enough for some people!”
Up next is Mo Rocca’s field piece “Everlasting Chiu” about a guy who invented everlasting life foot braces and rings. I guess shoes don’t matter if you’re gonna live forever. All for $16.50!
He even had a website! Remember, that was a big deal in 1999. Alex wants to make enough money from these devices to invent a teleportation device.
I think I mentioned this a while back, but the God Stuff segment hosted by John Bloom was perhaps the first segment that put Daily Show on the map back when Craig Kilborn was hosting. It was a segment of clips from wackadoo TV preachers.
“Sometimes I wish God would give me a Holy Ghost Machine gun so I could blow people’s heads off!
Later on there’s a dude that kills Santa Claus! John says, “…and Rudolph wept.”
Okay, I need to get going to March. March 22nd to be exact. 20 years ago last weekend! Time to feel old.
saleintothe90s 