Holsten's Ice Cream Floats: Fuhgeddaboutit

Last weekend, my bf, his sister, brother-in-law and I stopped in Holsten's during a trip back to our small hometown in the Garden State.  The restaurant, a joint confectionary and diner, is a little spot on the corner of Broad Street and Watchung Avenue in Bloomfield, New Jersey and has been something of an institution in the area for generations.

Since 1964, the 50's-looking eatery has been locally famous for homemade candies and ice cream, like this amazing, heaping scoop of vanilla chocolate chip in my root beer float:

[caption id="attachment_142" align="aligncenter" width="260"] Holsten's Root Beer + Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Float[/caption]

But in 2007,  it was Holsten's onion rings that stole the show and became world famous. In the final episode of  the HBO hit series The Sopranos, Tony & his family ate the onion rings here and listened to "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey, just before the screen ambiguously cut to black.



About a year ago, when James Gandolfini passed away, Tony's fans flocked to Holsten's to pay tribute to him.  In his memory, the restaurant famously reserved the spot where the actor sat during the filming of the last scene.

[caption id="attachment_149" align="aligncenter" width="570"] Holsten's tribute to James Gandolfini. Image via The Bloomfield Patch.[/caption]

We reminisced about the Sopranos and trips to Holsten's growing up while sitting in the booth next to Tony's.  We ordered the onion rings and liked them, but the ice cream floats? Fuhgeddaboutit.

[caption id="attachment_140" align="aligncenter" width="455"] Scott & I drinking an ice cream float from Holsten's.[/caption]

 

 

Thinking Outside the Bottle: Boxed Water is Better®

In need of some water after a run, I stopped in Birdbath Bakery recently and was caught off guard when I found the water they were selling was not bottled, but boxed.

The brand was Boxed Water is Better®, and the unique carton's bold branding and packaging immediately piqued my interest.

[caption id="attachment_124" align="aligncenter" width="463"] Boxed Water is Better.[/caption]

I looked up the company when I got home and found that their website is also beautifully simple and well designed.

Self-described as "Part sustainable water company, part art project, part philanthropic project, and completely curious", the eco-conscious water distributor based in Grand Rapids, MI apparently doubled its sales in 2013.  Check out the Environmental section of their site to learn about their green initiatives like a partnership with 1% For the Planet and the reduced carbon footprint of cartons vs. bottles.

The Dead Sea Scrolls of CVS

Completing a purchase at a CVS starts off normally enough:

"Do you have an ExtraCare card?" the cashier asks.

"Yes", you say, handing over your key chain, unsure if you've ever gotten any real benefit from being an ExtraCare member but indifferent to it.

The cashier swipes the card and begins ringing up your products. He/she places them in plastic CVS brand bags your reusable earth-friendly canvas bag that you remembered to bring. You hand over your credit card to complete the transaction and wait for a receipt.

But then, something weird happens: Your receipt DOES. NOT. STOP. PRINTING.

Instead of a normal-sized piece of receipt paper, a seemingly infinite rectangle inscribed in strange glyphs rapidly cascades out of the register. It's another excessively long CVS coupon scroll!

The cashier puts the scroll of coupons in your bag, and it begins it's journey toward a) the pile of other two-foot-long scrolls you saved from previous trips and never bring back to CVS or b) your garbage can.

Either way, the unnecessary paper waste is destined for the top layer of Fresh Kills, where  it will hopefully decompose faster than the time it takes to chop down the trees needed to make the millions of other scrolls just like it. You can only hope it won't fly away and wrap itself around the neck of a poor, unsuspecting sea gull.

[caption id="attachment_106" align="aligncenter" width="676"] Two CVS scrolls cluttering up my apartment.[/caption]

Unlike the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls, CVS scrolls are not fascinating texts written in Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew and Nabataean on parchment paper and papyrus. They are not studied by historians and scholars and they do not hold any historical significance whatsoever.  However, similar to the Dead Sea Scrolls, CVS scrolls are ancient.

[caption id="attachment_119" align="aligncenter" width="676"] Dead Sea Scrolls[/caption]

In the Digital Age, printing millions of yardstick-long bar code coupons is antiquated and wasteful. Especially since one of CVS's top competitors, Walgreens/Duane Reade, went digital with their customer rewards points long ago. At Duane Reade, they keep track of your accumulated points and apply the discounts to your next shop automatically. They don't expect you to carry around a scroll, search it for applicable discounts, and remember to bring it back to the store with you.

I decided to hop on Facebook and give CVS a heads up about their competitor's more eco- and customer-friendly practices and see what they had to say about their scrolls. Here was there response:



Apparently, you can choose a "Send to Card" option for your coupons here, which should cut down on the length of your CVS scrolls. You could do that or you could just shop at Duane Reade, where you don't have to login or click anything to take advantage of the discounts you earned.

Three Yogis

A couple of months ago, I clicked on a Facebook sponsored ad for a Free One Month Trial at YogaWorks. After attending level 2/3 and 3/4 classes at the studio's SoHo and Westside locations regularly, I was hooked and decided to sign on as a member. So, Kudos to YogaWorks' online marketing team for savvy targeting and getting my click.

In case you're interested, the company appears to run one week free trials year-round and one month trials occasionally. Check out their website or Facebook page (each location has its own) to find out about current deals.

Since I've kicked my practice up a notch, I wanted to share three of my favorite New York yoga teachers. This isn't meant to be a ranking of teachers/classes a la  Rate Your Burn, this is just  a shout out to 3 great teachers in NYC with very different styles whose classes I've really enjoyed and learned from over the years. Namaste.

LARA BENUSIS

[caption id="attachment_84" align="aligncenter" width="370"] Image via facebook.com/lara.benusis[/caption]

Website: www.larabenusis.com

Where She Teaches: Equinox NYC locations

About Her Class: A former professional ballet dancer, Lara does yoga with confident and graceful movements. Sometimes she incorporates elements of dance-like exercises into the practice which is challenging and different. I first got into yoga taking her Level 1 classes at Equinox, and she is a great teacher for beginners and as well as a little bit more experienced yogis. She gives attention to each person in the class and helps you get the poses right by making gentle adjustments. Her classes end with a very long, relaxing savasana which balances out an hour and a half of challenging Level 1-2 work. This is a great class to go to after a particularly stressful day.

 

MARCO ROJAS

[caption id="attachment_86" align="aligncenter" width="498"] Image via marcorojasyoga.org[/caption]

Website: marcorojasyoga.org

 Where He Teaches: NY Loves Yoga (UWS), House of Jai (UES), Ishta Yoga (East Village)

About His Class: Marco brings a lot of spirituality to his classes, and under his guidance you will learn about G.O.D. - Generating, Organizing and Destroying energy. If you've been doing Level 1 for awhile and need a new challenge, go to his class to be  pushed to the next level. Marco has a wonderfully strong voice, and his tone raises to bring intensity and and high energy to the more challenging movements. Be prepared for him to adjust you - he is known for moving students into poses that push them well outside their comfort zone. This class is fun. You will leave feeling productive and enlightened.

SHERMAN MORRIS

[caption id="attachment_87" align="aligncenter" width="314"] Image via yogaworks.com[/caption]

Website: YogaWorks Profile Page

Where He Teaches: YogaWorks NYC - SoHo and Westside

About His Class: Sherman's Level 2/3 and Level 3/4 classes are the most challenging yoga classes I've taken to date.  Prepare to sweat and be sore the next day. Under Sherman's guidance, you can expect lots of diverse music, inversions, deep stretching, long salutation sequences, push-ups and core work. I love Sherman's no nonsense sarcasm and sense of humor. If you're doing a pose wrong - he will tell you. This class is about mental and physical discipline, strength and improvement. It's also about having fun. His sayings like "make peace with your big toe" and "happy baby, baby" and many, many others remind you to have fun throughout. Sherman ends every class with the same closing message: "Until next time, spread the love."

From Pinterest...

 

When the best social media campaign is no social media campaign

After the mega-successes of social media campaigns like Ben & Jerry’s City-Churned and and HBO's #RoastJoffrey, we’ve been shining a celebratory spotlight on the two-way dialogue between consumers and brands and the innovative marketing possibilities of that message mechanism.

These campaigns have created an unprecedented change in the relationship between customers and brands: the customer loves the brand for acknowledging and appreciating them; the brand loves the costumer for providing crowd-sourced, marketable brand love and free broadcasting. More and more organizations are using this kind of participatory marketing that social media platforms allow for, and they should.

 Except when they shouldn’t.

An organization that probably should not jump on the conversational marketing bandwagon is the New York Police Department. A couple of months ago, the NYPD unintentionally started a worldwide conversation about police brutality with this open-ended tweet:

[caption id="attachment_55" align="aligncenter" width="464"] The tweet heard round the world #myNYPD[/caption]

Intended to be a crowd-sourced photo collection of happy citizens and NY police officers, the #myNYPD campaign quickly spiralled out of control as people began sharing images and anecdotes of police clashing with citizens in countries around the world.  The social/PR disaster highlighted the risks involved in launching a discussion-based social media campaign and the lack of control a brand/organization has over the direction of a conversation it starts.

Before deciding to execute a conversational campaign, an organization first needs to think about all of its product and service offerings and the inherent emotional response people have to those products and services.  Do those products/services evoke negative feelings? Are they somehow unpleasant, uncomfortable or controversial? Just because many organizations are using conversational campaigns successfully, doesn’t necessarily mean it makes sense for any organization to do one. For mission critical organizations like banks and government agencies, which often find themselves at the center of controversy, opening up a conversation on social media can be extremely risky business. If issuing parking tickets and arrests are in your repertoire of service offerings – it’s probably not worth the risk.

On the other hand, for more light-hearted brands whose products and services evoke mostly pleasant and positive feelings in people, a conversational campaign is more likely to be a huge hit than a potential risk.  For example, Oreo’s Snack Hackathon, which feature’s consumer-submitted “Snack Hacks” via a Tumblr blog, is a campaign that comes with very little risk comparatively.

No matter what an organization’s products/services are, three main areas of focus need to be part of the development of a conversational marketing campaign:

• Risk Assessment –Asking “If this conversation were to head in negative direction, what would that look like?” is a critical part of developing a conversational social campaign.  What does a bad direction look like? What does the worst case scenario look like? How many bad directions could there be and what is likelihood? Every decision comes with risk, of course, and there is always going to be some element of “you never know.” But every possible potential risk factor should be identified and thought about.


•  Sentiment Analysis – Social listening tools such as Crimson Hexagon or Sysomos often come with a hefty price tag, but they are crucial for big brand to use when developing a conversational social campaign.  You need to understand what conversations people are having about your brand before you insert yourself into those conversations. If there is a significant amount of passionately negative discussion happening about your brand, it may be too risky to launch a conversational campaign.


•  Contingency Planning– After identifying risks and understanding existing sentiment, a contingency plan can be developed.  In the event your campaign takes an unexpected turn, how will you respond? What resources will a good response plan involve?  Beyond action from your social/community team, your PR team and even C-level members of your organization may need to be involved in the preparation of a contingency plan.

Of course, no matter how well you plan, there is always going to be some element of “you never know” on social media. While brands enjoy the innovative marketing power that these digital channels have grown to provide, every businessperson needs to keep in mind that social media is still the tool of the masses. It’s the place where smaller, unpopular voices get heard alongside the bigger voices, and the place where people go to participate in democracy and start grassroots movements. You can’t be 100% sure what will happen when you open up a conversation to a worldwide audience, so think it through and plan smart!

Taking a stand against sitting

I get asked a lot about my "standing desk" at work.

That's in quotes because it's not a real-deal standing desk like one of these fancy >$1,000 pieces of hardware or one of these even crazier >$5,000 treadmill contraptions that are just a bit over-the-top.

Mine's more like a standing desk hack. I made it by simply placing a TableTote™ I purchased for ~$25 on top of my regular company-issued desk. A TableTote™ looks like a foldable tray with detachable, telescoping legs. According to their website, it's intended to be used for resting laptops and projectors during presentations, but I find it works great for adding extra height to my desk. If you're wondering what this looks like, here I am in action at my standing desk:

I first started using this DIY standing desk in 2012, after reading tons of articles about the dangers of sitting all day.  Research done by endocrinologist James Levine of the Mayo Clinic found that sitting at a desk for more than four hours a day increases your risk of heart problems by 125 percent and increases your risk of death from any cause by nearly 50 percent.  (The "any cause" language is a bit of a question mark, but I'm assuming that applies to disease-related causes of death not other causes of death like random accidents.)

It took a few weeks to adjust to standing most of the day, but now I'm used to used it. Some days I alternate between sitting and standing, but  I do my best to stand most of the time. Overall, I feel like it's helped with posture, back soreness, and that feeling of "I've been immobile for ~8 hours today and I feel like crap about myself" that sets in after a day stuck inside an office.

One outcome of using a standing desk has been totally unexpected: networking. Since my office is an open floor layout, many curious passers by have stopped to introduce themselves and ask questions about the contraption. It's been a great way to meet different people from all levels of the company who I otherwise wouldn't interact with.

So, if you sit most of the day, this is a really easy and cheap way to be a little healthier every day. Plus, you might end up meeting some new people as a result.

For some standing desk recommendations and tips on how to best position one, check out this article from Wired.

Shop TableTote™ (starting at $27.99) here.

Milk & Cookie Shots > Cronuts™

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to attend a presentation and Q&A with award-winning pastry chef Dominique Ansel of the preeminent Dominique Ansel Bakery in SoHo. Chef Ansel is most well known for the culinary sensation known as The Cronut™ which began its takeover of NYC last May and established Ansel's small, eponymous bakery as one of the top destinations for pastry in the world.

If you don't know what a Cronut™ is, in which case, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!?!? -  it is essentially a croissant with a hole in the middle, lots of sugar and some frosting.

Now, I like sugary doughy things as much as the next person, but pastry/doughnuts/croissants would never compel me enough to be fanatical. This being the case, it's been perplexing and somewhat humorous to watch the entire world become so freakishly obsessed passionately fascinated by the $5 Cronut™ over the past year or so.

I don't mean  to hate on all the foodies who are nuts for Cronuts here. To be fair, I only had one bite of a Cronut™  last summer. Though I don't find the taste as amazing as the rest of Earth does, what I do find impressive  is the cultural phenomenon the little center-less bun has created.

The Cronut™ has maintained almost the same level of buzzworthiness since it's launch  for over a year now. As of this writing, there are 72,800+ photos on Instagram tagged #Cronut and counting. Every day on my way to work, I observe the frenzied line of Cronut™ - cravers snaking down Spring Street and up Broadway. When Cronut Mania reached fever pitch sometime last summer, the daily line reportedly started forming around 5:30am for the bakery's 8am opening.  These days I'm told the line starts closer to 6:30am - 7am.  As Business Week mentions, the Cronut™  Line is nearly as famous as the Cronut™ itself. The Dominique Ansel's website even has a section in it's Cronut™ 101 tab that calls out proper etiquette in the Cronut™ Line: "Do not cut or reserve spots for friends and we hope you don’t endorse any scalpers you may see. Please do try to keep the sidewalk clear of obstruction so there is ample room for passersby and keep your voice level to a minimum."

As Ansel explained yesterday, he refuses to mass produce his creation and thereby diminish it's quality. You've got to respect that. He only makes 300 for sale per day plus 150 for special orders. The result is a demand that is never met and a sustained state of exclusivity. Ansel should be just as praised for savvy marketing/business sense as he is for inventing the juggernaut of the dessert world.

Though not the biggest fan of doughnuts or pastries, I am definitely a huge fan of cookies - particularly of the chocolate chip variety. So when we got to try Ansel's latest baking innovation, the Milk & Cookie Shot, after the Q&A session, I was really excited. Made with incredible Valrhona Chocolate, the delicious, chewy cookie portion serves as a cup holder for vanilla-infused farm milk from upstate New York.

If you ask me, this $3 dessert is definitely better than its world famous predecessor. If you're sampling one at the bakery, ask for extra milk - you'll need some while you eat the cookie part. They'll provide it to you in a separate (non-edible) cup.

Good luck waiting in that line. Cheers!

[caption id="attachment_24" align="aligncenter" width="483"] Cookie Shot by Dominique Ansel[/caption]

A Consumer Journey

“Work finally begins,” says Alain de Botton, “when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.”

After years of procrastination, I've finally started a blog.

In the process of determining a purpose and name for this blog, I kept coming back to a phrase we use constantly in the wonderful world of digital marketing jargon: Consumer Journey.

In marketing speak, the Consumer Journey refers to the experiences and steps a customer takes before arriving at a point of sale. Analyzing the consumer journey often involves identifying obstacles and number of clicks needed to make a conversion (typically a monetary transaction) then determining how to improve, optimize and simplify that path online.

Off the web and on a much greater and more complicated scale, I realized life in a capitalist society is its own Consumer Journey with many paths and purchasing decisions to make every day.  Voting with our dollars is one of our greatest powers. The ability to choose what to consume and what not to consume allows us to make an immediate positive or negative impact on our world and ourselves.

In my effort to be a more conscientious consumer who makes smarter, better purchasing decisions, I chose to make this blog about the things I choose to buy, eat, watch, read and otherwise consume. Hopefully by looking at consumption decisions through the lens of my own Consumer Journey, I can encourage other consumers think a little more thoroughly about their own decisions.

Your feedback, comments and random musings are welcome and encouraged.  Thanks for reading & hope you enjoy.

Sarah