Breakthrough works like Vance Packard's 1957 best-seller Hidden Persuaders made Boomer college boys like me aware of the techniques that Madison Avenue and mass merchandisers would someday be using to enhance their in-store marketing messages.
One technique, the playing of background music in retail stores and supermarkets, was highly touted as a way to subliminally jump-start shoppers' buying urges. For half a century the subliminal music strategy has been universally accepted. It has been implemented by nearly every retailer from Wal-Mart to the local mom and pop grocery store.
In recent years, however, the dreaded PA system phrase "Attention Shoppers!" is being heard much more. It is usually followed by some sort of annoying propaganda and, more often than not, the interruption comes at the very moment when you had just begun humming along with the elevatorized version of some monster acid rock hit from your youth.
At that very moment just as you were subliminally grabbing snacks and beverages that had originally been deleted from your shopping list to keep you within your grocery budget and to keep you from exceeding the AMA's height/weight ratio recommendations, you were rudely forced to hear that some obscure product has suddenly been marked down or that the store's pharmacy will be conducting a blood pressure screening next Tuesday or that your plastic store key fob might get you a nickel-a-gallon discount at the gas station with a 50-buck purchase.
This not only breaks the intended subliminal music spell but, if you're like me, it will probably make you return all of your subliminally-selected items to the nearest available shelf space at once. For example:
I had never heard the In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida guitar solo played on the cello before and, quite frankly, I was really grooving on it when the amateur announcer's voice began droning. By the time the nitwit finished his loud, boring, poorly-read announcement the store's Muzak system was playing a lame oboe arrangement of Harper Valley PTA. My bag of habañero corn chips ended up in an end display of toilet tissue.
If I had wanted to hear raspy-voiced fumferers directing each other from one department to another or if I had wanted to be subjected to the incessant paging of incoming phone calls, I could have gone to work instead of to the supermarket. If I had wanted to spend way too much money while being continuously aggravated I could have taken a trip on the NY State Thruway.
The only time I would ever be happy to hear some dopey kid or his manager come on the PA is if the opener "Attention Shoppers!" is quickly and clearly followed by "the store is on fire...all of the emergency exits are wide open so get out of here as quickly as you possibly can!"
If I owned or managed a store I'd want to make my customers happy, not annoyed, that they came to my place to spend their hard-earned money. Are uninterrupted music and a moratorium on amateurish announcements too much to ask?
Finally, a return to good old-fashioned subliminal selling would be an excellent stimulus for the US economy.
Trust me, One-of-a-kind Love Affair
was not meant for a French Horn solo.
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