56% of Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises takes place in various cafes where the characters down liquor and coffee as if it’s the Sunday before Lent.

Unsurprisingly, Hemingway also spent a vast majority of his time writing in these French Starbucks imitations.

There are approximately 12,440 Starbucks worldwide.

My favorite place in the world is Elevate, and that happens to be a coffeeshop with live music.

Conclusion? Coffeeshops such as Starbucks or The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf are taking over the world.

(And I”m not just saying that because, as a writer, I spend an inordinate amount of time around the fumes of ground up coffee and cocoa beans)

Sure, you can try and make a frappechino in your own home, but, if you’ve got mad skills like me, you’ll end up disappointed and unsatisfied with a watery milkshake instead of the frothy heaven that is the Starbucks version.

We pay top dollar for gourmet coffee drinks not only because they’re trendy, but because they’re freaking delicious. Not to mention you can’t walk a block in Vegas without bumping into the International Sign of Peace that is a welcoming Starbucks sign.

Even Starbucks competitors are shaking up the Coffeeshop playing field with innovations such as live music, roomier locations and cheaper coffee.

So go shell out $3.45 for a Grande trip to Cloud 9 in the form of a caffeinated beverage. We only live once, so we might as well be awake for it.

Ladies and gentleman, here at The Nearby Future, we would love nothing more than to run rampant with glitter and turn our homepage into a tinsel-y mess of fantastically sparkling pictures that resembles a Christmas tree decorated by a four year old.

But we don’t.

We consider glitter on a homepage a sign of weakness.

Or desperation.

But what glitter combined with unnecessary adjectives and verbs really means is a desperate company doing anything to sell, sell, sell.

(I’m not just calling out Conair here. Read the article about my theory that adjectives = failure and verbs = desperation HERE)

Let me begin by saying that I love Conair. I use (and lose) bucket loads of their bobby pins on a weekly basis. (Probably not that good for the environment, but I digress.)

All right, enough disclaimer, time for the smack down:

• Note the circled, blue sparkles. Point made.
• See everything that is highlighted? In the yellow? Those are the unnecessary words that burn my inner editor whenever I see companies drown us in meaningless phrases such as “Tourmaline Ceramic Ionic technology”. What does that even mean to us consumers? Sure, it’s some fancy lingo, but it’s pointless and out of place on this web page.
• Ok, ok, I was just pointing out the cliche business talk in purple. It’s so common in today’s marketplace that I don’t have much to complain about there, it just sounds cheesy. So cheesy, in fact, it makes one lactose intolerant at the mere sight of such overused words. “You decide. You Style.” “Dry, straighten and shine in one simple step.” Just reading those makes you think of an overenthusiastic car salesman, doesn’t it?
• Why can’t people just say “blowdryer”?
• That picture with the blue star next to it looks like something used everyday… in the military procedures, that is.
• That last product doesn’t even make logical sense.

You’re probably sitting there, wondering why I’m going over this page with you. (Well if you haven’t read my article about verbs, adjectives and the well being of companies, you’re probably a little more than lost. You’re so lost you could be stranded in the middle of some distant planet and think you’re still on Earth for all I know.)

Companies have stopped sugarcoating their products. They’re drenching them in high fructose corn syrup. Everything is coming out with more adjectives, verbs, and designs. Each clunky new hairdryer (or Infiniti Ionic Hair Styler, for that matter) is pushing the limits of customer design.

In short, advertising is crafty and companies will use every method to sell you their products. Just remember this, and you’ll save yourself a lot of money.

-Rika

We’re in a recession. Can’t you smell the desperation in the air? If you want to tell which companies aren’t doing so hot by simply perusing one of their products, count the number of adjectives. The more adjectives, the more debt the company has. A company goes through a verb phrase before they unconsciously turn to adjectives to save them.

Photo Courtesy of dwstucke from Flickr

Verbs: they are not anyone’s friend right now.

• Verbs have begin sprouting on my bobby pin labels; “Dream, Imagine, Create”. After researching Conair (the maker of said bobby pins) I discovered that they are going out of business. Because I bought these bobby pins some time back, I searched through other Conair labels and saw a massive increase in adjectives shortly after the spike in verbs,  a tell tale sign of a tanking company.
• Another example of the rule “more verbs = more desperation” is “Pilot”, a pen company based mostly in Japan but also sells in the U.S. and I found some interesting data. A week ago I bought some pens from them- “Easy Touch Retractable”. See? We’re all ready in trouble here. This cover is full of verbs- “Feel me!”, “Retractable Ball Point Pen”, “Refillable”, and even “Made in USA” which I find ironic because even though it’s made in the U.S. it’s a Japan based company. This company is inching into the full blown adjective stage, although it’s still in the troubled verb stage. But I bet it will, and it’s sales will decline also. Here is a page that illustrates my point.

Adjectives = Defeat

• Wrigleys: After a company goes through the verb phase and begin descending into the darkness of company sales failure, we see those verbs get replaced by strange adjectives and equally strange color schemes. Take 5 Gum, for instance. Owned by Wrigley, this product started out with flavor names such as “Rain” and “Flare”, but as it’s stock dropped those verbs disappeared and the company gave into a new flavor that is yellow and named “Lush” with the tagline “…a crisp tropical”. As things got tough, color schemes, names and taglines incorporated more confusing adjectives. And why isn’t it green if it’s supposed to  be tropical? After all, I think they’re trying to get at a “lush” rain forest.
• Conair: As mentioned above, the Conair company went through their verb stage many months previous to this article, when I bought bobby pins. Their adjective phase was a horrendous thing. Straighteners became “Ionic”, hairdryers became “Infiniti Ionic Hair Styler” with a tag line of “Tourmaline ceramic ionic technology”… do I have to continue?

In short, companies place a lot of verbs on their labels as financial troubles begin, and when those verbs get replaced by adjectives their financial troubles have escalated. Count the number of verbs and adjectives to gauge when to buy and sell a company’s stock or to just discover how they’re doing.

-Rika