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So much to snark at, so little time

By Ed Goldman

SOAR BUSINESS—United Airlines recently announced it’s going to personalize the ads you see on the seat-back screen in front of you when all you’re trying to do is watch a rerun of “Seinfeld.”  

It may be time to do a reset on the carrier’s catchy jingle—from “Fly the friendly skies/ Of United” to these 10 customized ones:

1. To a recently apprehended Columbian drug smuggler: “Fleeing is unwise/Once indicted.”
2. To a freckled tourist returning from a two-week stay in the Mojave Desert: “You have sunburned thighs/They’re ignited.”

3. To a recently convicted former U.S. President:  “Really bad disguise /You’ll be sighted.”
4. To a woman awaiting the results of a pregnancy test: “If the rabbit dies/Be delighted.”
5. To someone awaiting England’s highest honor: “When the crier cries/You’ll be knighted.”
6. To an anxious creditor: “When your debtor lies/You’ll get kited.”

7. To the partner of a perennial cheapskate: “If your boyfriend buys/Just don’t fight it.”
8. To people refusing to believe they haven’t been invited to a soirée: “Open up your eyes/You’ve been slighted.”
9. To people revisiting their old neighborhood for the first time in 35 years: “Did it shrink in size?/No, it’s blighted.” 
10. To a columnist who can’t believe his OSSO (oh-so-significant-other) didn’t like the first draft of his memoirs: “Don’t express surprise/Just rewrite it.”

Meanwhile, why shouldn’t other airlines get into this? “Delta is ready when you are” may morph into “Delta can find you a date, Clark.” And if TWA hadn’t got itself sucked into the metaphorical jet engine of American Airlines 23 years ago—okay, it was acquired—it might have saved itself by updating its own ditty. It could have turned “Up, up and away/Tee-Double-You-Way” into “Up, up and away/We’re waiting, Renee!”

N-FIDELITY—Nordstrom’s customer loyalty program is being blamed for its 2024 first-quarter loss of $39 million. This comes from thestreet.com, a business website: “Nordstrom’s loyalty rewards program, which is called The Nordy Club, rewards customers for shopping at its stores and allows customers to earn points towards Nordstrom Notes when they make purchases. When customers rack up enough Nordstrom Notes, they can spend them on anything they want at the company’s stores. For example, if customers earn 1,000 points they receive $10 in Nordstrom Notes.”

My first questions upon reading this—and having been a longtime customer of Nordstrom before it closed its Sacramento store—were:

(1) Why didn’t anyone at Nordstrom ever tell me there was something I could join called The Nordy Club?

(2) What void in my life would have ever made me want to join something called The Nordy Club?

Blaming its faithful customers for the upscale chain’s fiscal ineptitude strikes me as on a par with Red Lobster’s recent declaration of bankruptcy, which it largely blamed on customers for mistaking it’s all-the-shrimp-you-can-eat program for an all-the-shrimp-you-can-eat program.

It doesn’t take much imagination to extend this blame-everyone-else philosophy—often called in clinical circles TCAMHS (The Cat-Ate-My-Homework Syndrome)—to two recent incidents. The first was when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito displayed an upside-down American flag to denote oneness with Donald Trump’s infamous MAGA Morons®). The second was when former Democratic Senator Bob Menendez accepted bribes in the form of cash, gold bars and a luxury car, then  not being smart enough to hide them somewhere other than his home.

In these cases, the chivalrous culprits broke land speed records blaming their wives. This is why it’s helpful to own cats.