Tag: walmart

I am in the wrong segment of this industry

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Forbes: Walmart “rebrands” for the first time in nearly 20 years, response is predictable but justifiable

Often times I get pegged of being jaded or pessimistic about the design industry.  Why are you in it then?  If you don’t like it, do something else with your life.  And so on, and so on.

Well, this is a prime example of why I, and other designers end up the way we do, is when we hear about the richest companies on the planet, dumping millions of dollars into rebranding efforts, that in this case are literally taking their old logo and adding 1-2 points of stroke around it, and then calling it rebrand.

By the way, this Sisyphus-ian effort cost $1.25 million dollars.

Honestly, in the history of rebrands, $1.25M isn’t the worst or highest dollar amount sunk into one, but considering the sheer lack of effort that went into this, it’s still pretty noteworthy, and undoubtedly chalks up to be a classic example of egregious corporate waste of money.

For years, I’ve always called the Walmart star “the butthole” because let’s be real here, it basically looked like a little yellow sphincter, and I figured it was apropos that they did that, considering the sheer amounts of fucking they did to the market, economy and small business.  Also, I personally think Walmart sucks ass as a whole, so there’s that association too.

I don’t really know or can fathom why Walmart felt the need to rebrand in the first place, but I guess if those in the world of business feel  if you’re not constantly evolving, you’re dying, shit like redundant, unnecessary and minimal effort rebrands gets accusatory eyes off your nuts for a minute and makes it look like they’re doing something, other than fucking the world of commerce and getting a bunch of old white men richer by the hour.

Seriously though, there’s really not as much to rant about as I felt there could’ve been; that’s just how little effort that Walmart put into this rebrand.  They literally just pressed increase stroke around both the butthole as well as the wordmark, and the end result is a bolder wordmark, and a butthole that has appeared to have gotten a little more clenched.

There’s an easy joke about the shitshow that 2025 and beyond seems like it’s going to be, leading to clenched anoos-es throughout ‘Murica, but I don’t get the impression that Walmart as a company isn’t necessarily in opposition to the parties that might be leading to these tighter assholes, so I don’t think it really works.

Perhaps it’s more representative to how the company is a bunch of tightwad fucks who sinch and clench and choke out small businesses throughout the world, squeezing all the way to their assholes, which is ultimately what the butthole represents.

Either way, I don’t shop there, and I actively go out of my way to typically avoid them when I can.  I like protecting my butthole literally and metaphorically, and don’t wish to support companies that go out their way to raze the buttholes of the people; as well as put out shitty creative and branding.

#TRYHARDSZN2024: Student Loans vs. Walmart U?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

😊: Bentonville teenager accepted into numerous prestigious schools, among them multiple Ivy League schools and . . . Georgia Tech

Shoutout to this kid who decided to flash his Georgia Tech acceptance letter in the same photograph with Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Penn, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Berkeley and Stanford.  He must really think highly of their robotics program, or perhaps he’s a thrill-seeker wanting to go to a school where students are allowed to concealed carry.

Aside from the obvious clowning about Georgia Tech, this kid really is among the higher-tier TRYHARDs of the SZN, having notched five of the eight Ivies, and it seems pretty clear that Brown and Dartmouth are the Ivies that people either forget and/or don’t care about, because of all these TRYHARD stories that I’ve been trying to track this SZN, those are often the two that are omitted with these kids.  Or maybe Harvard is trying to outreach and not be so staunch, while Brown, Dartmouth and seemingly Yale want to keep their velvet ropes up intact and do as much curating as possible.

Either way, what drew my attention was the fact that this particular TRYHARD being from Bentonville, Arkansas, to which I would guess most people might be aware, is known for being the home and headquarters to one of the biggest capitalistic cancers in history, Walmart.

Which begs the question of what if this bright young man were to forego the pursuit of college, and be one of those guys that just got his foot in the door young to a literal Fortune #1-caliber company like Walmart and just began applying himself into the corporate grind.

As unsexy as it might seem, there are countless stories of people who enter large corporations at the ground level, and through almost no other means than longevity, eventually begin climbing up the corporate ladder, and by the time their peers have graduated college with avalanches of student debts, they’re sitting in management with a very high ceiling still left to achieve, and ultimately end up being the stiffs in suits that make six figures and live in Microsoft Office all day long, when they’re not delegating.

I’m curious if a kid as bright as this TRYHARD were to just forget school, and put his brain into the Walmart machine instead, if he would ultimately have a more lucrative career in the long run, instead of becoming a cog in any Ivy League school or Georgia Tech, and falling into student debt, bad habits and academic rat racing.  I don’t know what this kid’s specialty is, but perhaps being as bright as he is, he doesn’t have to slave away at the store level first, and can get into corporate early, and work on technology, POS or other technological ways to part their shoppers from their money.

But then again, this kid is either Indian or Pakistani, and living in a hicktown like Bentonville, Arkansas, I get why he probably wants to get the fuck out.  Forget everything I said about considering Walmart U over Harvard or Stanford.  Good for you kid, for being smart enough to light the path out of Arkansas; hopefully you’re smart enough to not pick Georgia Tech over those fancy Ivy League schools.

Well, she wasn’t entirely wrong

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

lol: A Susan goes to Wal-Mart, sees an nWo wrestling t-shirt, blasts Wal-Mart on social media for supporting global elites trying to push for a literal new world order

I guess she didn’t see the WWE logo on the very picture she took, or more likely she didn’t take the two seconds to verify what the logo was if she didn’t recognize it in the first place.

Either way, this story made my day, and it’s not often that I’m put in a position where I have to take the side of Wal-Mart, but when the day is over Susan/Becky/Karen culture is worse than the corporate disgust of even Wal-Mart.

This was a classic case of a Susan who goes around looking for things to SJW about, and hoping to be the first one to do such.  And once she found something that she thought she could get her teeth into, she doesn’t even try to do a little background research about it before going off on Facebook about her conspiracy theories of global elites on top of attempting to shame big business despite the fact that she herself was apparently shopping at a Wal-Mart.

And naturally because the internet lives for little else than the opportunities to point out when other people are wrong, it didn’t take long for the Susan to become the target of all sorts of laughter and ridicule once it was realized that she was flagrantly mistaking a professional wrestling t-shirt for propaganda for the Illuminati.

But let’s play devil’s advocate here a little bit; Susan wasn’t entirely wrong with her remarks of:

global elites pushing for the nWo (New World Order) which includes one world leader, one world religion, one world currency and one world government

…as long as it was kept within the appropriate context: of professional wrestling.

I mean seriously, look at those assholes (above).  Hulk Hogan, Kevin Nash and Scott Hall (sorry, it was hard to find a decent image that didn’t include at least one scrub like Sean Waltman), if it were truly up to them, they really would have pushed for such an agenda.  Undoubtedly, Hogan would love to be the one world leader [of professional wrestling] and he’s already declared himself to be God before [not just god of professional wrestling, or A god, but just straight up God god with a capital G].  Nash and Hall are two of the greediest motherfuckers in the history of the industry, so they’d obviously be all about one world currency, especially if it meant they got to have more of it than anyone else, and would probably be supportive of whatever one world government would help expedite that collection of money.

So Susan wasn’t totally wrong with her conspiracy theory, she just went a little overboard with its boundaries, and it was just unfortunate that she happened to do it on social media, where once it makes it onto the internet, it didn’t matter that she deleted the post later, there’s always going to be at least one prick who will have screen grabbed it and chronicled it forever, and then it becomes fodder for some rando brogger.

I went to Wal-Mart and it didn’t totally suck

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

An interesting thing happened the other day: I went to a Wal-Mart and the experience did not completely suck.  Nor did it magically evaporate 30 minutes of my life that I’d wish for back once I vacated the premises.  I parked, entered the building, picked up my purchases, and I was back out the door in less than five minutes.

Thanks to these gigantic, orange obelisk-like technological marvels, Wal-Mart created a system where customers like me could pay for our stuff online, and pick up our goods at the store without the need to interact with the worst part about going to any Wal-Mart in the first place – people.

When mythical wife made an online purchase with a store pickup, and then asked me to make the pickup, my initial reaction was like OJ Simpson cringing in the courtroom; the idea of going to Wal-Mart is tantamount to being asked to go to Christmas mass.  It’s just something I really don’t ever want to do, but given the need to begin amassing as many diapers as we’re likely going to need, it was a necessary evil.  Frankly, if I had to go to a Wal-Mart in the first place, I went ahead and capitalized on the same deal mythical wife did, and placed an order myself, because we may as well get double the diapers if I’m going to make a single trip.

I assumed I’d have go to the dreaded customer service line where there would inevitably be a mix of people attempting to return something they obviously used but are trying to spin as being defective, someone trying to cash a paycheck and bitching about the unreasonable fee that they’re collecting to do so, or other schlubs like me picking up online orders, but probably weren’t even remotely close to being fulfilled.

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Profit matters

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is funny to me: Public outraged over Black Lives Matter merchandise being sold on Walmart.com

This is about the definition of an everyone loses situation.  White people are outraged over BLM crap being sold at Walmart, because they’re all inherently racist and don’t really think that black lives matter.  Black people are outraged over BLM crap being sold at Walmart, because they feel that the movement is “theirs,” and take offense to someone other than “them” making money on it.  Walmart loses because it doesn’t matter what they do, they can’t not get negative press, further reinforcing the notion that they are incapable of ever doing the right thing, except finding an endless well of bridges to burn for the sake of nickel and dime profiting.

For me, the funniest thing about this entire thing is that when seeking stuff online like the t-shirt, it’s the auto-population on the website that displays a BLM shirt on the guy from The Blue Lagoon.  He looks like about the last guy on the planet that would want to be seen wearing a BLM t-shirt, much less be immortalized on the internet as a victim of shitty code and lack of creativity and be screen grabbed as a fervent supporter of such “a terrorist group.”

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The disillusionment towards design

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Anyone who’s ever gone inside a Walmart might be familiar with their private label products; the Great Value name that Walmart uses as their store brand.  Fairly easily identifiable by the uniformity of white packaging or labels, and their minor variation of colors based on the product.

It’s clean and it’s simple, there’s absolutely no denying that.  It’s exactly what Walmart wishes their own brand to appear, despite the fact that their name is synonymous with lower-class America, but I’m straying from the point.  For its efforts and objective, the current iteration of the Great Brand identity has won a couple of design awards, and received lots of accolade from the general design community.

It is that part of the story, that I cannot necessarily agree with.

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Steal from Walmart, get owned – to death

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A sadistic part of me finds morbid amusement at reading about the tyranny and carnage that occasionally takes place during each year’s Black Fridays.  As unfortunate as it is that the worst stories that emerge from Black Fridays typically include death, I can’t help but be astonished at some of the lengths people will sometimes go to in order to get their grubby hands on particular doorbuster items.

I saw this story of a man getting essentially brutalized to death at Walmart, and was kind of half-surprised, half-not surprised at the fact that it led to an AJC link, meaning the incident took place in the greater Metro Atlanta area.  I’m never really surprised when some of the worst things happen in Atlanta, because that’s kind of how I perceive this place sometimes.

Continue reading “Steal from Walmart, get owned – to death” →