This week: cardboard signs, Haggen supersizes the downsize, the 6-hour day, dead rodents, fearless deer, and giraffe with something to say.
Or maybe the joke is that not having a home is itself a barrier to employment? Because that’s not funny either.
An internet job board named “City Calling” decided to win some attention with a curious guerrilla marketing stunt. They created little figurative vignettes of homelessness — i.e. blankets, a cardboard sign, old shoes & maybe a dog bowl tucked into the corner of an urban building. The punchline: the cardboard sign says “Found a job,” with a City Calling logo and URL underneath.
The joke, apparently, that their job board is so good that impoverished people are able to replace their panhandling signs with freshly printed guerrilla advertisements on sharp, fresh sheets of cardboard. If you don’t find that funny, here’s the logic of the joke: homeless people jobs smelly haha funny.
It’s enough to make you wonder if we don’t need some actual guerrillas and not just guerrilla marketers out there in the urban core of our cities taking on the crisis of poverty. Also: punch up, people.
Next they're gonna party like it's nineteen 99-cent stores
Just being able to confidently pronounce the name “Haggen” has long functioned as a test of how long you have lived in the Northwest part of Washington State. But now its name has come to signify colossal management failure, after a vast expansion has gone sour, fast.
After purchasing a chunk of stores left over from the Albertson/Safeway merger, Haggen grew from 18 stores to 146. The stores almost immediately began to fail, they’ve since filed for bankruptcy, and are now planning to shrink back down to just 37 stores, eliminating more than 5,000 jobs up and down the West Coast.
Employees got the news in a “terse” memo which explained “this store is not part of the ongoing business model.” But don’t worry — as a Seattle Times editor pointed out, customers are still getting a pajama party with cantaloupe bowling & pig rides.
Working nine to three
Americans keep on working more and more hours — except for those of us who can’t get the hours we need and are stuck as involuntary part-time workers — but in Sweden, there are new experiments with a 6-hour workday. For the same wage.
While the experiment is small, the participating employers — including retirement homes and a Toyota service center — have so far found higher productivity, increased staff well-being, and improved quality. And while a 25% reduction in the standard workday may sound radical, productivity has doubled since the 1970s, so why aren’t 4-hour days in sight?
We still wonder: what does the fox say?
A dead rodent was found in some boiled peanuts at a Hawaii military mart. It was deteriorated, had no fur, and was reportedly the size of “two peanuts put together,” but the murderer has not been identified.
Packs of fearless deer are taking over the streets of Ashland, Oregon. The mayor has called a “Deer Summit 2015” to respond to reports that deer have “stalked people, pawed at them with their hooves and even stomped on small dogs.”
Giraffes have been found to “hum” all night long as a mode of communication — just like ducks say quack, fish say blub, and elephants go toot. Previously they had been thought to only “bleat”, “brrr”, “burst”, “cough”, “growl”, “grunt”, “low” “moan”, “moo”, “sneeze”, “snore” or “snort”.