distributors is willing to think through any of the possibilities for increasing the numbers on Little Sammies, Mumbo Jumbos, and Tigermelts with imaginative promotions. If I could clone myself, this was one of the times I would have worked the phones, to make the most of the Blessed Chocolate Virgin, and if I had felt more comfortable in my de facto role as head of the business at that time, I might have tried to get going with a fast production of a Limited-Edition Zip’s Blessed Chocolate Virgin, using the Little Sammies production line,with a molded figure replicating that holy object sent by God to Zip’s Candies, here on Earth, in New Haven, Connecticut, at the edge of the Quinnipiac River, to blorp out of that striping nozzle onto the Tigermelt belt.
We are long overdue, to the point of real negligence, to find some room in the budget for a Spanish-language campaign with print ads, bus cards, urban street-level billboards—and this would have been our golden opportunity. But we were just treading water as it was at that time, and that was before Channel 8’s ambush, so there was really no chance for Zip’s to cash in on the Blessed Chocolate Virgin.
And so, Zip’s being Zip’s, the whole Blessed Chocolate Virgin moment was only good for some meaningless local color news coverage and temporary fodder for those lunatics who apparently sit at their computers all day long and post constantly in the comments area on the strange fan blog devoted to Little Sammies that Julie monitors (she tells me the bloggers call themselves a community), and we got no bump, not even a discern-able blip, on our Tigermelt numbers for that quarter.
And we probably lost any chance we had for Tigermelt traction from the Chocolate Blessed Virgin not just because of our trademark inertia (there’s an idea—we really should make a Zip’s Inertia bar, a glucose-saturated bar guaranteed to zap your glycemic index and keep you sedentary, unproductive, and ambition-free, and market it to the burnt-out middle management worker), but also because of what happened with Frieda when the busload of Guatemalan nuns from Queens arrived to see the Blessed Chocolate Virgin.
I was supervising the floor, with two lines running, and Jacob was trying to cover both the front office and Receiving. Jacob was on the loading dock arguing with the delivery guy for our sugarsupplier about some ripped bags and consequent moisture damage and waste in the previous delivery. Julie had called in to say she was working from her apartment, which is code for too depressed and disorganized to get up and get dressed, I am sorry to say.
It was one of Frieda’s good days, so instead of being at home expressing her contempt for one of the extraordinarily patient home health aides we employed in thankless eight-hour shifts to keep her out of trouble and to make it possible for her to keep living in the house she and Sam shared for the last forty years of their fifty-two years together, she was on the premises, in the old, little-used bookkeeper’s office down at the end near the factory door. There she could spend an hour or two zealously date-stamping stacks of old, now-meaningless invoices from the 1980s in a kinetic parody of the actual work she did at Zip’s for so many decades before that well-tempered mind grew softer and duller, losing its snap and gloss. I have a mental picture of what happened to Frieda’s brain as it gradually lost its deep crenellations and became smoother and smoother and duller and duller, like what happens to the Tigermelts when there’s a pileup on the belt running through the enrober and some bars get stalled under the nozzles and become heavily overcoated.
Five years ago, Frieda’s loosening grasp of reality forced us to maneuver her gradual withdrawal from any genuine responsibilities at Zip’s. Irene knew about this shift, and she certainly knew about her mother’s faltering mental state, so it is hardly legitimate for her now
We are long overdue, to the point of real negligence, to find some room in the budget for a Spanish-language campaign with print ads, bus cards, urban street-level billboards—and this would have been our golden opportunity. But we were just treading water as it was at that time, and that was before Channel 8’s ambush, so there was really no chance for Zip’s to cash in on the Blessed Chocolate Virgin.
And so, Zip’s being Zip’s, the whole Blessed Chocolate Virgin moment was only good for some meaningless local color news coverage and temporary fodder for those lunatics who apparently sit at their computers all day long and post constantly in the comments area on the strange fan blog devoted to Little Sammies that Julie monitors (she tells me the bloggers call themselves a community), and we got no bump, not even a discern-able blip, on our Tigermelt numbers for that quarter.
And we probably lost any chance we had for Tigermelt traction from the Chocolate Blessed Virgin not just because of our trademark inertia (there’s an idea—we really should make a Zip’s Inertia bar, a glucose-saturated bar guaranteed to zap your glycemic index and keep you sedentary, unproductive, and ambition-free, and market it to the burnt-out middle management worker), but also because of what happened with Frieda when the busload of Guatemalan nuns from Queens arrived to see the Blessed Chocolate Virgin.
I was supervising the floor, with two lines running, and Jacob was trying to cover both the front office and Receiving. Jacob was on the loading dock arguing with the delivery guy for our sugarsupplier about some ripped bags and consequent moisture damage and waste in the previous delivery. Julie had called in to say she was working from her apartment, which is code for too depressed and disorganized to get up and get dressed, I am sorry to say.
It was one of Frieda’s good days, so instead of being at home expressing her contempt for one of the extraordinarily patient home health aides we employed in thankless eight-hour shifts to keep her out of trouble and to make it possible for her to keep living in the house she and Sam shared for the last forty years of their fifty-two years together, she was on the premises, in the old, little-used bookkeeper’s office down at the end near the factory door. There she could spend an hour or two zealously date-stamping stacks of old, now-meaningless invoices from the 1980s in a kinetic parody of the actual work she did at Zip’s for so many decades before that well-tempered mind grew softer and duller, losing its snap and gloss. I have a mental picture of what happened to Frieda’s brain as it gradually lost its deep crenellations and became smoother and smoother and duller and duller, like what happens to the Tigermelts when there’s a pileup on the belt running through the enrober and some bars get stalled under the nozzles and become heavily overcoated.
Five years ago, Frieda’s loosening grasp of reality forced us to maneuver her gradual withdrawal from any genuine responsibilities at Zip’s. Irene knew about this shift, and she certainly knew about her mother’s faltering mental state, so it is hardly legitimate for her now
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