Today, I got a circular email along the lines of that old classic, the Nieman Marcus cookie recipe email.
This was a typical “forward to all your friends” circular way back in the mists of time – i.e. the late nineties. Do you remember it? The gist was, this woman was having coffee at the above named department store with her neice, daughter, nephew, son, cousin, sister, mum… it varies. But that’s not the point. Basically she bought a cookie. She asked the waiter for the recipe, as it was so damn nice.
The recipe was produced. She went to pay her bill. The recipe had cost her $600, or some such amount.
She said she didn’t want the recipe that badly; the store said she could have already copied or memorised it, and she had to pay.
So she decided to forward the recipe on to EVERYONE in the WHOLE WORLD, in the hope that people would just make the cookies themselves and do Nieman Marcus out of much much more than the $600 she had paid – after all, the cookies were $1.50 each, so to “break even” she only needed 400 people to not buy one to begin to “hurt the company”.
This has ALWAYS annoyed me. Number one, because people are fucking stupid enough to believe things like this. It’s almost as unbelievable as “if you forward this email to 50 friends in the next six seconds, your dick will double in size and that hot 18 year old girl across the road will fall madly in love with you”, or “Forward to a million people and Bill Gates will find Maddie”.
Number two, why the fuck would you go out, buy a cookie and then ask for the recipe? These people are in business. OK, Nieman Marcus is a high quality multi-million dollar retailer, which doesn’t survive on the income from a few biscuits. “Oh shit, we’re down $600 this month because no-one bought these cookies. Fuck!” No. It’s one less ivory backscratcher.
Three, if I am out shopping, and fancy a snack, I buy one. I don’t think “I may be hungry now, but rather than spending a quid or two on something to munch, I’ll wait three hours until I get home – having gone via Tesco to spend a fiver on the ingredients – then spend half an hour making biscuits, because this company treated this lady meanly.” No. Gimme the fucking cookie now.
Four, and most unbelievable, is that fifteen years on people STILL insist on forwarding the same ridiculous old emails, albeit in a slightly different guise – this time the store was Selfridges and the recipe was for a cake, but it’s the same exact story.
Don’t do it people. You’ll face the wrath.
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