…and Elvis has left the building!

that they polled customers afterwards points to this being a simple corporate fuckup

Yes, this is my thought as well. They bought their way into the market, somehow thinking it was the chunk of real estate and not the services provided that kept customers coming back over and over again. They didn’t even bother to see what these services were, came in like a bull in a china shop, indifferent to the point of oblivious about it, even as the accounting department back at the home office had to process out all the kitchen equipment, the self-service soda and ice cream machines, etc., from every store in Baja.

Nowadays, 7-11 is still there, puttering along, as a generic clone of Oxxo, the other large mini-market chain in Mexico, offering nothing special, except maybe along the lines of - “Hmm… Oxxo is three blocks this way, 7-11 is one block that way, I guess I’ll go to 7-11”, and Oxxos are everywhere, Jesus… like somebody gleefully abused the copy/paste function.

Now this truly does sound like a horrifying story.
Move over McRib, 'cause here comes Georgie “Please Let Me Die” Pie, even less often than you do!

Imagine if McDonald’s had actually defeated Jollibee in the Philippines, absorbed them, then resuscitated their menu once a year.
But that didn’t happen, I wonder how did Jollibee not only survive, but thrive? What was their crucial chessboard move there?

Gather round, children, and let me tell you a story of the same type of mindless corporate stupidity that happened in my state, about how something successful was ruined because all they could see was at the surface level…

When the mini-market chain AM/PM opened some stores in Baja California, they came up with a hybrid concept that also included a made-to-order fast food kitchen serving burgers, and a sizable seating area, they called this Dave’s Kitchen. It was a huge, huge hit.

Enter 7-11 into the scene. Getting wind of this new phenomenon and armed with corporate cash from their Mexico offices in… Monterrey I think it was… they bought every AM/PM in the state and converted them to 7-11s, surely salivating at the prospect of this large client base that was supposedly built-in with their acquisition.

So what was the first thing they did?
They shuttered Dave’s Kitchen. Poof… gone!
They got rid of the soda machine, the ice cream machine… instead of assimilating the business model of what they had bought, they got rid of everything that made these AM/PMs unique in the market, replaced it with their own bland and generic way of doing things according to the home office in Monterrey.

Within a month, the new 7-11s had lost around 3/4 of their customers. Their emergency response was to send in a squad of corporate poll takers to pester the customers still there and see… why the other ones had gone, I guess?

Asking the wrong questions (why did the customers leave in droves?) to the wrong people (the few remaining clients who didn’t leave). And thus, nothing of value was learned, because when your corporate business school suits are clumsy unthinking hammers, every situation and problem look like a goddamned nail.

The crowd that murdoch and limbaugh handed the orange parasite on a platter, does not care about pesky and boring little things like facts and figures. It is an irrational mob fed with bacteria-infested red meat for two decades. They can only be reached via the basest of impulses, ripe pickings only for the most ignorant and/or shameless of conmen. It doesn’t help society that the right-wing toxic propaganda machine operates at full blast 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

What’s with the number buttons being available with no “OK” or “Enter” option?

Serving the will of The Lord! Which just so happens to be the will of the male head of the house. One and the same.

Stockholm Syndrome and they don’t even know it.

“Well that does NOT look like a coincidence to me! God doesn’t make mistakes!”: most evangelicals, with their leave-brain-at-door-and-pick-up-your-crayons medieval “logic”.

Their fantasy is seeing a barefoot and pregnant woman washing dishes and who’s never had an orgasm.

This visual is uniquely soothing, reminds me of artist Cory Arcangel, who did an art piece with just the Super Mario clouds drifting on a television screen - hacking into the NES cartridge and getting rid of everything else - to much admiration.

I remember reading an art journalist applauding the Impressionistic feel of the thing, the way Arcangel brought a background object to the fore, and in the process transformed it into something new entirely, with a surprising character and strength of presence.

Here’s a Whitney Museum link to the work.

Add a full mug of beer after getting a ship sunk!

Maybe the problem is that they’re all trying to be the same goddamned thing, like how there are 15 or more goddamned hamburger chains.

“We want to be like facebook! Also like Youtube and twitter and tiktok! And like Instagram!”

Maybe if they stuck to their speciality and strengths, pick a lane and stay in it, they would prosper. But no! God forbid!

Now imagine the actual Steve McQueen driving at top Mustang speed up and down those streets in Bullitt. Absolute legend.

Many can’t even make it up The Grapevine between LA and Bakersfield.

A steep so slope, it keep you woke!
Seriously, don’t drive down this thing in your semi-truck tired, don’t even think about going down that waterpark slide unless you’re well rested when you get there.

Imagine this spot being your best alternative as a civil engineer, that’s one helluva mountain range. What’s this, like a pass between the Karakoram or something? Somewhere in the Andes?

Because so many trump voters are low-information, rabid and impervious to fact and/or reason. They will vote orange even if he shoots someone on Fifth Avenue to death, or if there are 32-or-whatever felony indictments/verdicts.

Meanwhile, many potential Democrat voters are also low-information in their own way - impressionable, fickle and with little memory retention, they seem unable to act upon a clear and present danger until it punches them in the goddamned face (and by then of course it’s too late), somehow have normalized the orange threat and are easy prey to an algorithm pushing a “both parties are the same” divide-and-conquer propaganda.

The difference between a parasite-laden excrement chip cookie and a raisin oatmeal cookie, “But I wanted chocolate chip! bOtH cOoKiEs ArE tHe SaMe!”

Nature is based

…it’s lawyers all the way down.

Also, bigger lawyers feed on smaller lawyers, scoop them up in gigantic mouthfuls, can consume up to four tonnes per day.

“Guess where I hid the banana.”

Its’ best days are ahead, not behind. And being a decentralized entity - like Bit Torrent or Bitcoin - makes it an important social media experiment that is worth stoking the flames, and whose outcome will be much different than it was with reddit.

It’s curious, but in my mind these types of mathematical or logical visualizations are the sheep I count, trying to sense the deeper flow and patterns where the emergent oddities even out.

That’s when I know I will soon fall fast asleep, when my mind starts getting abstract.