What is it with Sherwin-Williams Paints? First they put up advertising posters featuring a lurid picture of the globe with blood-red paint pouring from a can labeled "SWP", spreading across the world like Communist tentacles in a John Birch Society propaganda piece, with the caption: "COVER THE WORLD". Nota bene: SWP also stands for Socialist Workers Party...
Now they have some damn-fool radio ad offering people paint "the color of your grandmother's face". I guess this is intended to show their versatility, while pandering to some treacly instinct supposed to exist by their Wall Street ad wizards, who've spent so much time jetting between their country houses, spa manicurists, and banking-district high-rise offices that they've lost all contact with the bourgeoisie (and no doubt their gammies too; probably interned long ago in expensive but remote nursing homes where their endless complaints about the demise of the Merv Griffin Show cannot be heard).
What if this bizarre offer were actually taken up?
Customer: Hello, I'd like a can of paint to match my grandmother's face.
Clerk: To match your...ah...I see...hmmm...I'm not sure what color that is, exactly.
Customer: Kind o' grayish-yaller with little red spots.
Clerk (hesitating): I'm not sure...may I ask what this is to be used for? Perhaps then I might have a better idea, you see...
Customer: I heard it in your radio ad. It's not for anything -- it's an impulse purchase.
Clerk: Could you wait here just one moment please. (Withdraws to back room)
Clerk (to supervisor in rear office): Call security.
Supervisor: Why? What is it?
Clerk: Some weirdo. I told him to wait at the counter.
Supervisor: Is he threatening?
Clerk: No, but --
Supervisor: Is he pocketing things?
Clerk: No, but he wants a can of paint "to match his grandmother's face".
Supervisor: So?
Clerk: Sir...he wants a can of paint to match his grandmother's face.
Supervisor: I don't care if he wants a can of paint to match his grandmother's feces -- you're a *sales* clerk, my boy: SELL him something!
Mark Adkins snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com