As much as I love Think Geek I always thought their stuff was a pretty niche market. Admittedly I and a lot of my coworkers and tabletop game buddies are that niche but I never thought there were enough to support a brick and mortar presence much less a whole freaking chain of them.
That said the one at the local mall has tshirts for $10 right now and I have some dads day cash to spend.
Not sure how ahead of the closure curve this location is as the mall itself is going to get torn down for new mixed commercial/residential buildings and the training center for the new NHL team.
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Ha ha. Never worked for a corporation have we?
But to be honest, they should have had a Corporatese to English translator present if they’re going to let marketing talk directly to the public.
I swear that so much corporate time is wasted in meetings just constantly re-learning vocabulary… Ok, so now “mentoring” which we were calling “side by sides” are now called “Gembas”? WTF? (this is actually true for my company). We’ll be referring to interdepartmental meetings as “A3’s”? Why? Did someone not understand the phrase “interdepartmental”? It’s certainly not more efficient to have to remember which new code word applies to what you think of as an “interdepartmental meeting” as it would be just to stick with the self descriptive phrase that everyone’s used to, and conveys the meaning even if you’ve not heard it before.
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That, plus the quality of their swag was extremely hit or miss. Apparel was safe, but their electronics, well, a little research went a long way. That said, my ThinkGeek Portal bookends give me a smile every time look at them. I assume the aliens picking over our charred remains will find them and try to color-code their wormholes.
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Thinkgeek used to be cool. It used to sell cool stuff. Actual proper geek stuff that geeks needed in order to properly geek.
For the last few years it has sold only horrible t-shirts and mugs with Harry Potter on them. That is not geekitude. And no thinking was involved.
I’m glad it’s dead, it had become an embarrassment.
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That whole quote made me stop in my tracks. I felt like corporate speak had suddenly regressed by about 30 years.
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I stopped going when the Caffeine section dwindled to almost nothing. XTZ Tea, woooo!
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Just think of it this way. Some schlub paid $100k on business school in order to come up with that word salad statement.
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I don’t think this was from marketing. Marketing would have dressed it up for the public. This sounds like the bullshit in the corporate board room that went direct to the public vs being filtered for the masses. Like a Trump tweet.
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Has anyone else just gotten tired of branded swag? I went right to the website, and I literally can’t find anything that would improve my life in any way. Is it an anti-consumerism wave, or am I just getting old?
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The Marketing Gibberish Generator
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Both. Also unlike like 20 some years ago, there is so much of it now. Some of it really really cool, but a lot of it meh. You can’t geek out over everything. Geek fatigue?
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You are getting old. But they have always had a lot of stuff that was cool but I never needed or realized I would never use it.
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I used them a lot for secret santas, great way to quickly find something zany under 20 bucks.
Amazon does not compare.
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This was posted under the category “clising”. What is clising? More corporate-speak that I don’t know?
oh, the stories i could tell.
fortunately, i gave it all up around the time “onboarding” replaced “orientation.”
to be fair, engineers do it sometimes too. ( “performant” is not a word. sorry everyone. )
personally, i like imagine to newspeakers clothed in robes of horsehair, waving censors of incense while chanting half-understood latin. somehow it helps.
[edited to add…]:
now that’s a thing of beauty.
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Lucky you (I’m completely serious, this is not sarcasm). Living the dream!
Replacing known words with secret ninja corporate vocabulary seems to be a transparent attempt to increase group solidarity by creating a group specific lingo. Little do they understand how much the peons hate it, and look at it as utterly stupid and wasteful.
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Oops, should have said “operations”… You’re entirely correct. Marketing or sales would have bullshitted it up completely.
I go to Meh for my woot now.
that too may be part of the point. only groups with power can make their own slang and force others to use it
the emperor may be wearing no clothes, but who’s really going to tell him
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This.
And this
but also:
You can’t flog executives expensive “leadership” training and sell lots of books, if you just regurgitate the same stuff from the 70s all the time.
So you dust off the language, make up a few new buzzwords, file off a few names here and there, add in some hokey semi-mystic crap about some magic process you discovered used by the Inuit/Klingons/Koreans/Swedes/cats/dogs or whatever you think will tickle the zeitgeist.
Then suddenly HR can justify the training spend; all the wannabe ‘leaders’ will pretend to be thrilled by your wisdom and use all the ‘new’ language to show they’ve got the secret knowledge and so should be given the key to the executive bathroom asap.
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