nteresting  day on the road today. Coming home from breakfast with a friend, tooling along in the right lane of a two lane exit, not quite there yet. In my rear view, I spot a BMW FUV coming up hard behind me, maybe 90 to my 75. Of course, while he’s got all the room in the world, he changes lanes at the last second, clipping past my rear quarter for no better reason that it gives him a thrill to pass like a race car driver.

Cute, except that we were entering a hard right off ramp going to a different freeway, a hard turn with a 40 mph warning sign. Of course, while the beamer had money and horsepower, he lacked stability and  skill. He was on his brakes, coming down sharp to 50. Me, I touched my mini (“as maneuverable as the devil”, as Baron Von Richthofen once said) up to 80, blew down his right side handily, and was a hundred yards away and extending  even before he was out  of the curve. Merged neatly into traffic and never saw him again.

The point is, I don’t like BMW drivers. BMW’s attract a certain type of person (social-hopping yuppies, in my mind). Now, at first, I’d think it’s the driver’s fault for driving like this. But then again, BMW actively plays the notion of being “superior” in cars like theirs. As Douglas Coupland noted in Generation X, “BMW drivers drive as they do because they believe their ad copy”. Very true.

So corporations, by their public facing, gain some customers yet alienate others.

I don’t know why, if you are the head of some huge corporation, you don’t keep your pie-hole shut. Just make a fine product and market it on those points. Period.

A good example – my wife and I used to enjoy Chick-fil-a sandwiches. It made for a nice evening out. But given that we have many gay friends (and I’d feel this way even if I did not), the manner of their donations to anti-gay groups really choked me on their sandwiches. So I wont go, not now and likely not ever. And Chick-fil-a, your commercial zooming on your sandwiches with “actual customer endorsements” (two guys chatting like close, close pals) is a transparent act to win back lost customers. You’re going to have to go further than that for me.

And My Pillow? Really? Here’s a nice successful company pretty much ruined by its crazed election-denial conspiracy ranting. Frankly, even if I could smother my worst enemy with a pillow but I could only use one of yours, I’d forgo the opportunity.

I once met the CEO of a corporation I worked with. He made a reference about Blazing Saddles, the scene where the sheriff takes himself hostage. Now, it’s profanity-littered (the N-word, specifically) but it works because it makes racists look as dumb as the bad guys in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, gullible enough to believe the simplest trick. Anti-racist, of course, but it’s like telling a sexual joke to your priest – not appropriate. Too much context to safely unwrap. I watched the man bubble about that scene and thought “where are your handlers?”.

So yes, in this age of recordings and videos, where stories don’t wait for the late edition but wing out onto the internet, why a corporate official would say something stupid/political/racist/class-orientation is beyond me. You do so at your own peril. We vote with dollars.

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