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May 25, 2012 at 08:29 AM
First: If I somehow seem to be referring to one of your brochures here, please don’t take this personally. I understand where you’re coming from. It’s easier to criticize a sales pitch than to write a sales pitch.
But, anyhow: A lot of brochures, ads, and other marketing and consumer education materials I see include a statement along these lines: “Even consumers who are strapped for cash can protect themselves against the risk of needing formal long-term care by using the money they now plow into coffee to pay for long-term care insurance.”
Other companies use similar “convert coffee money into premium money” suggestions in materials promoting life insurance, disability insurance, and many other worthwhile products and activities, such as supporting fine charities and cultural institutions.
National Underwriter Life & Underwriter, one of the publications that contributes content to this website, has run articles including suggestions of that nature since 1897.
The problem with the argument is that, for many people, drinking a nice, over-priced cup of coffee is one of the few reliable little pleasures they have the time, energy and money to enjoy.
Long hours and increasing demands (Why did you take 2 hours to respond to that e-mail? Where are those 7 tweets you’re supposed to tweet today?) are rapidly sucking the life force out of people who, at least temporarily, have money to spend.
The people who are still employed in this economy may not have enough time to take long, enjoyable walks in the neighborhood, go to a museum, soak their feet in herbal salts, cook a healthy gourmet meal, or breathe more than necessary to sustain life. They may have enough time to cram down food, of some kind; take care of their children well enough and often enough to keep the authorities at bay; and sleep often enough and long enough to prevent their eyes from turning red as cherries.
Their bosses are mad at them for bleating pitifully that, actually, they’re too tired to learn how to develop iPhone apps from scratch and create crackerjack apps “in their spare time.”
Their spouses are mad them for giving into the bosses and ending up agreeing to learn how to create iPhone apps, Google Android apps, and armies of sentient clones who will go out and whack prospects over the head with paper brochures. And trying to grow the clones in vats in the spare bedroom.
The baristas, in contrast, like the employed people, or pretend to like them, in a reliable fashion. All the employed people have to do to get those brief flashes of good cheer is to buy beverages regularly and leave respectable tips.
