oh how life changes…
The Scheme
In The Office episode Moroccan Christmas (Season 5 Episode 11) Dwight buys up all of the ‘Princess Unicorn’ dolls that he can find at local stores a few weeks before Christmas… the plan being to resell the dolls to local, desperate, parents at wildly inflated prices.
Which may very well have been an okay scheme when the episode originally aired on December 11, 2008.
But now… well it’s funny how a joke that was semi plausible years ago is now improbable.
Not only could you get the toy off of Amazon overnight… You most likely would have enough time to order it online from Walmart and Target. If you were in select cities you could even have the toy delivered the same day.
You could also have the toy shipped to a store. Which, interestingly would’ve already happened. Dwight bought out stores inventory weeks in advance… Which is enough time for a store to order and restock what is now clearly a hot toy.
Simply put, if Dwight were to try the scheme a decade later he’d most likely end up losing a good chunk of change. American logistic systems are just too fast now. If Dwight were to make the scheme work in a modern context… he would need to buy out stores at the very last moment.
Which would mean one or two days before Christmas… which would mean that Dwight would have a much smaller potential customer pool to sell to since people who waited till the last day before Christmas to get presents are only a fraction of the people who were buying two weeks in advance.
It’s simply a dumb plan now and we have technology to thank for that.
It’s funny how people are still enjoying a show that has somehow already become outdated.
Society matches on I guess… Capitalism marches on… at an ever increasing speed. But art, TV shows, are in a sense timeless.
Dang you Amazon for all of this convenience!!!
