Reader J sent me this. We can’t find it online so all we have is this rather large scan. It’s written by the CEO of Restoration Hardware and appears in the latest edition of the Restoration Hardware catalog, it goes on forever, so I’ll give an excerpt:
“Every movement has a LUNATIC FRINGE.”
America’s first Nobel Prize winner. Commander of the legendary “Rough Riders.” Medal of Honor recipient. Promoter of the Conservation Movement.” Leader of the Progressive Movement. Noted for his exuberant personality, and ranked by scholars as one of our greatest presidents. Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt proclaimed in his famous speech in
[….]1920at the Sorbonne in Paris that, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”In this, our largest ever Source Book/Magalog/Catalog (at 616 pages we’re not quite sure what to call it), discover the efforts of progressive thinkers from around the globe. And we ask that you hang on to it, as we do our part to support conservation and won’t be sending you another one until next spring (bold mine).
Are we part of the “lunatic fringe”?
Only sending a 600 page catalog every three months instead of every month is a move so bold that it may qualify you as a lunatic. The CEO of Restoration Hardware might be a great guy, for all I know, but it is amazing to me how seriously our Galtian Overlords take themselves sometimes. Everything they do is bold or courageous or visionary.
JustBeingPedantic
Nice trick, considering that Roosevelt died in 1919. (Actually, he gave the speech in 1910.)
bleh
Ah, but you see, not only is HE visionary, but so also are his CUSTOMERS, who themselves “support conservation” by receiving and — by ordering from it — continuing to request a 600-page catalog, and who also show how bold and visionary they are by paying Restoration Hardware’s eye-popping-ly outrageous prices for only-fairly-good-quality mass-manufactured goods.
Villago Delenda Est
This of course assumes that anything this guy attributes to TR is authentic.
Yutsano
I don’t even know what the hell this is all supposed to mean…
Punchy
IIRC, I briefly owned stock in this POS a few years back. Company was as unstable as their CEO seems to be.
Violet
Reminds me of J. Peterman from Seinfeld.
JPL
A few years ago I ordered hinges from the above mentioned company online and have been receiving catalogs ever since. I recycled my 600 page catalog. I did save a smaller catalog because I want to copy a headboard that they showed. It’s my project this winter.
JPL
@Punchy: The catalogs that I’ve received over the last few years had to cost more than my order.
Libby
@Violet: Back in the dark ages, before internet shopping, Christmas catalogs were the shizzle. And J Peterman was one of the best catalogs ever. Ridiculously over priced stuff, but the catalog was really arty and entertaining. Now that I’m remembering those days, kind of miss the reading of the catalogs in front of the fireplace thing.
namekarB
If the USPS would only place a paper recycle bin at every mail box, think of the money they could generate recycling junk mail. I would love to drop junk mail at the mail box for recycle instead of lugging it inside the house.
The perfect business model. A business would pay the USPS to ship paper recyclables around the country in which the USPS gets bonus money for recycling same.
Raven
@JPL: Ever try The Sign of the Crab? Downloadable catalog.
Violet
If you go to the home page of Restoration Hardware you can see a photo of Gary (the CEO) apparently penning the letter. He looks as you’d expect.
Violet
@Libby:
I remember the J. Peterman catalogs. Somehow my mom had gotten on their mailing list. They were awesome, with tremendously overpriced stuff. But the write ups for each item made you want to go be Indiana Jones. Truly great stuff.
TheOtherWA
Of course they tell themselves that. It’s how they justify their outrageous pay and perks. They “earned” it. Right.
Calouste
@namekarB:
Most apartment complexes do have recycle bins near the mail boxes. They tend to fill up pretty quickly.
Raven
The RH online catalogs are ok.
schrodinger's cat
Any updates about BJ meetup in Rochester that I missed? I haven’t been on here much the past couple of days.
bemused
@efgoldman:
Oooph, catalogs clogging up the mailbox. A few years ago I had been fuming about the excessive amount I was getting, half of them from companies I had never ordered from. It was getting worse by the day and I had planned to start calling their customer service numbers to tell them to take my name the hell of their mailing lists but hadn’t wanted to spend precious time on that chore. One day when I picked up my mail after getting home from a crappy day at work, I think there were over a dozen of the damn things in one day. I was so fed up, I didn’t even take off my coat and started calling. The companies I had never ordered from said I wasn’t on their mailing lists. Luckily, soon after I discovered a great website to opt out of getting catalogs I didn’t want, catalogchoice.org. It has worked beautifully. Now my mailbox isn’t crammed full and I rarely have to go back to the website to opt out when the catalogs start sneaking back in.
namekarB
@Calouste:
Ahh, but my bigger point was for the USPS to generate revenue by doing the recycling rather than supplementing an apartment manager’s income.
JPL
@Raven: Nice. I didn’t see the prices but I thought I was pretty upscale by going with Kohler…. Nice window behind the tub.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
I wonder how President Ted Theodore Logan Roosevelt would have felt about the bold initiative I undertook this afternoon. Instead of haggling the price of the seasonal dead tree ritual, i just took the price quoted, and consider any price break I might have won by negotiation, a tip.
I totally Obama’d it, but I feel good about it. Dude’s job kinda sucks on days like today.
tis the season to buy stupid shit without any reason.
Raven
@JPL: We bought the hardware for our clawfoot and the farm sink we salvaged and used for the bathroom sink. It was expensive but it is wearing well 12 years later.
schrodinger's cat
I actually like browsing through some of the catalogs, especially Eddie Bauer, LL Bean, Talbots, Williams Sonoma and Harry and David come to mind. Window shopping in your jammies!
SiubhanDuinne
@namekarB:
We had a big bin at my apartment complex (banks of mail boxes) for just that purpose, but some stupid residents kept putting their sticky Coke cans and half-eaten sandwiches in, and it was quickly overrun by a million ants, and removed.
ETA: Removed by apartment management, not ants. I’m pretty sure.
JPL
OT.. I mentioned this earlier but for the fans of “Rudy” this article was a disappointment.. link
What next Rudy quoting Roosevelt during one of his motivational speeches.
bemused
@Violet:
At a dollar store, John Peterman’s book, “Peterman Rides Again”, Adventures Continue with the Real “J. Peterman through Life & the Catalog Business. It’s kind of a fun read with photos of Peterman riding camels and so on. I love this Peterman quote on the back cover, “As my boat sank into the Zambezi, I watched my luggage float downstream over Victoria Falls. But the day wasn’t a total lost…”
JGabriel
DougJ:
I can’t get worked up over this one. It’s the nature of the beast that corporate marketing always pats itself on the back with a heavy hand.
This would have been a lot more fun and mockable if the guy had been quoting Ayn Rand or Newt Gingrich. But pushing a progressive political line to hardware buyers, and quoting Teddy Roosevelt in support of it?
I’m kind of okay with that, even if it is a little self-important and self-congratulatory.
.
Svensker
@Libby:
Yes. Laptop just ain’t the same.
Schlemizel
most of that is just sales FUD – its designed to make the customer feel like there is something significant – perhaps monumental – going on so they will want to be a part of the transformational event!
Now, if he actually believes it thats just sad but I think all he is really doing is peddling door nobs
Amir Khalid
@bleh:
So every year this Restoration Hardware outfit sends out 2,400 pages or so of catalog material to each customer, even though all the information is presumably available on its perfectly good website. Maybe that’s where their markups go, to the
CEO’s relativeCEO’s golfing buddycontractor who prints up those catalogs. And to FedEx for shipping them.There was a day when retailers sent out these huge catalogs, but that day is of course long gone. I think anyone here who’s worked under some pompous fool of a “business leader” will be familiar with this kind of stupidity: the Dear leader’s cockamamie notions and obsessions, dressed up as his boldness, courage and vision. Like thinking that people have Teddy Roosevelt on their minds when they shop for hardware or home furnishings.
A few years ago, my old newspaper, The Star, was a sponsor of a preseason exhibition match that Manchester United played in Malaysia. Whom did The Star put on the cover of the official souvenir program? Not a player like Cristiano Ronaldo or Wayne Rooney — the guy that all the boys dream of being, and all the girls dream of being with — but sixty-something manager Sir Alex Ferguson. Who but a CEO would consider Alex Ferguson the star of Manchester United?
dance around in your bones
Just wanted to say I got my VERY FIRST Balloon Juice coffee mug today (No one could have predicted!) and my very first tote bag (Pastafarian! explaining it to the grandkids is FUN!)
Got a birthday in December which sorta sucks. But also sorta rocks. Oh well, it’s been an eventful month or two.
Southern Beale
Only sending a 600 page catalog every three months instead of every month is a move so bold that it may qualify you as a lunatic.
God I wish the people at The Great Courses would get a fucking clue. I bought one audio lecture from them 3 years ago and have been getting WEEKLY catalogs ever since — despite signing up at “Catalog Choice” to have my name removed.
Honestly, all I get in the mail anymore is dozens of catalogs I neither want nor need. If the post office is so truly fucked, why don’t they charge these assholes more to flood my mailbox with stuff I never asked for?
Yutsano
@Amir Khalid: It’s hard out there being a Galtian overlord.
Mike in NC
I recall that whenever Dubya fucked something up, one of his apologists would trot out that TR quote. Because, of course, they were both among our greatest presidents!
PurpleGirl
@Libby: The Christmas catalogue that I remember vividly was the Sears & Roebuck Wish Book. Hundreds of pages of toys and all sorts of stuff. Aw, that was a book to look through.
D
I use to work in the Marketing dept. at Restoration Hardware, (Resto, as we called it) back when they were sending out 2 or 3 books a month. This BOLD MOVE to send quarterly books instead of one every month reeks of budget slashing tactic.
The books are the lifeline of their advertisements so for them to cut back this severely means the housing crash has put a significant dent in their bottom line.
suzanne
The big Restoration Hardware catalog is primarily intended for designers and architects, so it make slightly more sense, since most interior design and architecture offices have libraries of product samples and catalogs.
I WANT A 2012 BALLOON JUICE CALENDAR. Are they available for order yet?
Steeplejack
@Libby:
Horchow Collection! Haven’t thought of that in years. I wonder if they’re even still around.
. . . Wow. Dead site.
srv
RH is the Ikea for richer, older farts.
Steeplejack
@Violet:
Worse, actually. He looks like Ming the Merciless pondering galactic domination right before Flash Gordon shows up to kick his ass.
Running joke with my serial renovator brother is that you should always use “Polish nickel” in high-class plumbing projects, after a typo (“polish[ed] nickel”) in an R.H. catalogue.
schrodinger's cat
@srv: I hadn’t even heard of it or the Sears Wish book for that matter.
Cat Lady
Who fucking cares. It’s just meaningless shiny stuff peddled by a self-important nobody to other nobodies who substitute buying meaningless shiny stuff instead of doing anything meaningful. Then everybody dies owning (or owing on) meaningless shiny stuff. The End.
Libby
@Violet: Really. After reading JPeterman catalog I was so ready to go on safari in remote corners of the world.
Raven
@Libby: Don’t mess with my remotes!
Libby
@Svensker: Exactly. Just not the same. It’s like difference between reading a Kindle and holding a real book.
Libby
@PurpleGirl: I don’t remember that one specifically. But yeah, the toy catalogs were so fun. Even when I was allegedly a grown up.
Calouste
@Amir Khalid:
I can totally understand the decision not to put a picture of Wayne Rooney on the cover of a souvenir program. Heck, I could understand the decision not to put a picture of Wayne Rooney in the souvenir program. If the guy wasn’t a rich footballer, the only girls’ dreams he would appear in are nightmares.
Besides that, it’s not like Ferguson is a no-name manager. He is probably more popular with the fans than any of the squad. And at least you know he’s going to be involved in an exhibition match. They won’t risk any of the stars if they have the slightest injury.
scav
The Company Store sends sheet catalogs about as often as many people wash them. It is impossible not to speculate that our overlords in fact buy them that often as a gesture toward conserving water.
Libby
@Steeplejack: Not one I remember, but nice stuff. I used to get a similar one that featured cozy mountain cabin stuff. Wasn’t as elegant as this Horchow. Had lots of folk art deer, moose and bear motifs done in black metal and linens. And red plaids. Can’t remember the name of it.
Libby
@Raven: Ha! Wouldn’t dream of it.
schrodinger's cat
Speaking of catalogs. I need a recommendation for cookie sheets that are not non-stick and won’t break the bank. Thanks.
Kurt Montandon
The catalog is available here.
3 seconds with Google …
Cat Lady
@efgoldman:
Hugs, long walks, Handel and Rumi.
sharl
Is it certain that company co-CEO, Chairman, and visionary author Gary Friedman isn’t one of those animatronic cyborg thingies? [From here.]
burnspbesq
@Amir Khalid:
“Who but a CEO would consider Alex Ferguson the star of Manchester United?”
Umm, that would be me. Players come and go. Consistent excellence starts at the top.
Who, other than truly diehard Duke fans, remembers Tom Emma or Danny Meagher?
cathyx
@schrodinger’s cat: These are good, it doesn’t have to be this exact one, but they need to be fairly thick so that they don’t warp when you bake something.
Mike G
America may not lead the world in much anymore, but we’re still Number One in Shameless Marketing Hype.
dogwood
That catalog piece reminds us that there a a hellava lot of people who are sujbect to shameless flattery. Makes me think of my uncle who died last summer. He’d fit the contemporary definition of a “small businessman”. He made a good living, and considered himself rich. He also like to refer to himself as a Reagan Democrat, in that Reagan turned him into a Democrat. When we’d talk politics he’d always remind me that Republicans don’t just win votes by fear mongering. They also spend a great deal of time appealing to the egos and vanities of people like him. He’d tell me over and over that he hired thousands of people during his career, but never created a single job. Only demand creates jobs. He couldn’t have cared less about his personal or business tax rates. He wanted money in the pockets of the people who bought his goods and services. Wise man, my uncle. RIP.
sharl
Someone actually reviewed that catalog, back in September. Neither the reviewer nor her commenters were much impressed.
DougJ
@schrodinger’s cat:
Nothing planned yet! Maybe in January.
Jason
You’ve got to understand that the job CEOs and other upper management types do is actually, by and large, extremely mundane, and largely consists of making decisions like this (the other part of the job is social, business lunches, industry functions, and the like.) So, in order to feel important and justify their large salaries, they have to dress everythig they do up in pretentious “visionary” jargon, which is why they prattle endlessly in the latest buzzwords, like “systems thinking” and “transformational leadership” and “scalable b2b vertically integrated architecture” and so on.
The recently departed, Steve Jobs, for example, although portrayed as a technological genius, actually delegated all technical work to subordinates, and mostly signed off on aesthetic decisions like whether the Ipad button press click should go “chink” or”chunk.” Now, /somebody’s/ got to do that, but the people who actually make things like an Ipad possible — for example, the inventor of trellis modulation, or wavelet compression — are rarely so pretentious as the managers who benefit from the technologist’s innovations.
burnspbesq
@Jason:
Typical. Vision tends to be vastly undervalued by those who don’t have it.
priscianusjr
This is what it’s all about — especially the last bullet below:
” * You’re not imagining things. You probably are getting much more junk mail than anything else.
* That mail could make up better than half your neighborhood mailman’s (or woman’s) bag on a given day.
* The sheer abundance of this mail helps keep letter carriers and bulk mail specialists working.
* The size of the bulk mailings, and the number of companies that send them, make junk mail an important part of Postal Service revenue.
* But it’s so cheap overall that it still doesn’t contribute as much to the USPS as First-Class mail. And that’s despite the continuously declining popularity of sending stamped envelopes through the mail.”
http://stateimpact.npr.org/new-hampshire/2011/09/27/how-junk-mail-is-helping-to-prop-up-the-postal-service/
Chet
@PurpleGirl: Sears Wish Books? Here’s some serious nostalgia porn if you’re so inclined, PG:
WishbookWeb.com
JGabriel
@Jason:
Is he?
Maybe we have different ideas of what it means to be portrayed as a “technological” genius but nothing I’ve ever read suggested that Jobs was particularly brilliant as an engineer, systems architect, or information theorist. Instead, what was most often praised was his ability to shape systems and interfaces in attractive, useful, paradigm-setting ways that were extremely profitable.
In short, he was a design, sales, and business genius working in the tech field. That’s what I always picked up from his portrayals. The fact that so much of what he’s known for was in the field of design, and set the model for what we see when we look at technology and how we interact with it, is what gave him his reputation as “visionary”.
So, a design genius and a tech visionary, but not a tech genius. At least, that’s how I’ve always read and understood his portrayals.
.
dance around in your bones
Balloon Juice, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways…This thread would be one example…
PanurgeATL
@burnspbesq:
Technologists figure that the visionaries depend on them to have anything at all. Steve Jobs wasn’t exactly a visionary (though he’s the model of what we think of as one), but I suppose he brought a visionary’s attitude to what he did. He did deal with ideas that brought forth products that people demanded, thereby (ahem) creating jobs. When conservatives talk about “individuals” and “job creators”, it seems that they’re calling forth an archetype based on a man who got Al Gore to join his company’s board of directors.
What’s really notable is that (AFAICT) Jobs didn’t use the buzzwords. He spoke (it seems) in his own voice, and maybe that’s at the heart of his appeal–that someone could speak in his own voice and ditch the catch-phrases and still find himself the CEO of a Fortune 100 company. The idea that speaking in his own voice was actually the reason for his success seems lost on many. CEOs these days all seem to imagine that they’re Steve Jobs, and they don’t understand why they’re not.
Judas Escargot
@JGabriel:
Jobs was the master of the Use Case, to the point where he could convince end-users that they absolutely had to have something that they didn’t even know existed a few minutes before. He also doesn’t get enough credit as a master of the vertical supply chain– there’s a reason his company could not only create a decent tablet computer, but could sell you one for as low as $499 and still make a profit on it.
Notice how the iPad’s been out for almost two years, and you still can’t purchase a suitable Android knock-off at a similar price? That’s because Jobs spent a decade building up his supply chain, obtaining access to parts. The reason there’s still no $500 Droid-Pad is that it’s still impossible for most companies to build and sell you one at that price-point profitably. (Bezos is in a special position– he can sell you a Kindle Fire at cost because that device is just a means to an end for his actual business).
You’d have to go back to the days of Ford or Edison to find a similar model wrt manufacturing.