I still remember when Jet.com first launched. The media and internet touted them as an online retailer that could compete with Amazon. They had an interesting business model that was along the lines of things get cheaper the more you purchase. However, the notion of a membership fee was a tremendous turnoff for me, because I don’t really want to pay to have the right to shop.
Regardless, Jet seemed to do well without cheapskates like me supporting them. To the point where they attracted the eye of the much-reviled Wal-Mart, and ultimately sold to them for $3.3 billion dollars, because they thought that acquiring Jet would help them combat Amazon.
So it sounds like Jet has really hit the big time, but then I saw this commercial recently that makes me wonder just what in the world they’re thinking. Jet’s been pushing something called the “Careculator” in conjunction with their mobile app, where the thought process is that people can put a price on their friends and family.
Presumably, by allowing the Jet app to sync to your Facebook account (AKA farm your personal data), users can generate a dollar amount to spend on particular people, based on the number of likes and comments left by their online followers.
Because nothing measures the worth of another human being like their ability to push a button, write inane things in response to other peoples’ initiative and the obsessive compulsive need to be connected to social media in their apparent excess of free time.
By this logic, my family and friends should spend next to nothing on me, because I’m pretty scant in my Facebook participation in general, opting to primarily lurk and silently judge my Facebook friends on their preferences and opinions, instead of liking everything in sight and commenting and risk actually engaging conversations I probably don’t want to have.
I’m kind of a bad example to use for this because honestly I’d rather people don’t spend money on me and get me gifts, because then I’d feel no obligation or compulsion to reciprocate and expend effort and money that I can’t always say that I want to give.
However, the fallacy of this concept is that everyone knows that one or ten people who are absolutely obsessed with being on Facebook. The people who are the first to comment on absolutely everyone you mutually knows’ status updates, they like everything and utilize the various emotes to specify their likes, and they also go through and comb through all other comments and like every comment that supports their opinion, or detracts from their frenemies that they’re Facebook friends with to keep tabs on them and not because they’re actually friends.
By Jet’s Careculator logic, then these are the people that should command gigantic price tags for holiday gifts, because clearly they actually are vested in you and every single person on the internet, and not because they really have nothing better to do, and way too much free time on their hands.
Imagine the insufferable validation internet addicts would get if this logic actually were legitimate. Because they’re obsessed with being connected, being heard and farming attention, they’re deemed by an app to be the people who should command the highest gift values, and actually cashes in on expensive gifts and lots of them. The long-winded status updates about how their “hard work” pays off and that tangible gifts actually correlate with how much people like them. It would be a pitiful end-all in its own right.
There’s a good chance that this is a parody wrapped in a farce, presented as a deliberate hoax in order to draw attention. But I don’t really want to care to confirm, because I don’t want to download an extraneous app and hand over all my Facebook information to some data farm, so I’ll just come to the baseless conclusion that Jet is just a pitiful pretender, albeit flush with Wal-Mart money that is taking some unusual and kind of tacky approaches to competing with the competition.
