santa

To better days

My Fellow Inebriates,

I don’t know what was more evil yesterday:

  1. Watching Rick Perry conflate gay bashing with Christian values in under 30 seconds
  2. Seeing my coveted painting climb at ebay auction
  3. Learning that Santa’s pretend

Okay, I know, the first one’s the worst. Sure, I live in Canada, but here in the Great White North we often have a justifiably paranoid sense of piggybacking on American values, and when a stupid tool like Perry starts spouting off, I worry that at least some of my compatriots are nodding their heads in agreement.

Werewolf perhaps. Douchebag certainly.

Nice to see: Perry’s “Strong” spot netted him over 440,000 “dislikes” on YouTube. As for his 10,000+ “likes,” all I can do is raise a toast to rednecks. Too bad my dad won’t buy me any Bud.

Artist: Dan Lacey

The second item is becoming a minor personal tragedy. Somebody wants my objet d’art very badly, but I’m just a small, underfunded bear—I can’t compete with a bid like $38. As transported as I am by that painting, the alcoholic in me is automatically calculating how many bottles of wine it’s worth. Not to mention my dad said that if I used his PayPal account he would put me in the washing machine.

The third thing was just gonna happen, I guess. But seriously, how could I have known Santa wasn’t real? I mean, Canada Post delivers our letters to him, elves write back to us, NORAD tracks him for pete’s sake. Fine, I’m a naïve animal, but I didn’t expect my parents to be the dickheads who dropped the bomb.

Ample reasons, I think, to kick off the day with Smirnoff. I’m making a Salty Dog*: 2 oz each of vodka and grapefruit juice plus 2 tsp of salt. Yeah! Here’s to better days.

*substituting Malibu for vodka

Conversation with my buzzkill parents

My Fellow Inebriates,

The holidays are drawing closer and nobody’s stocking up our liquor cabinet. That, coupled with my anxiety over my ebay bid on a Dan Lacey painting, is making things a little tense. Finally I sent my parents a link to my liquor wish list, reckoning that if they would at least address that, we could relax and be festive.

But my parents are buzzkills.

 

I do kind of like the kids. They don’t actually play with me very much, although I get my moments in the spotlight for sure.

This really illustrates how much empathy they have. They seriously don’t care if we have booze for the holidays or not.

So casual!

And so heartless. Say it ain’t so, people. I don’t have a plan B.

If you’re reading this, Santa…

I don’t enjoy getting hosed by retailers at any time of year, but the festive season seems the most predatory. When I heard on the radio this morning that one-sixth of all gift cards go unredeemed, I was jolted into sobriety. One-sixth! That’s a lot of languishing gift cards—between 8 and 10% of all gift cards purchased.

Across North America, that’s over $8 billion dollars that’s been paid to retailers and never exchanged for goods. Talk about money for nothing!

Gift cards were on my mind because my mum was reading my list for Santa, and she said: “Why don’t you just ask Santa for a gift card so he doesn’t have to waste his time hunting for bizarre alcoholic products?”

Well, I would never want to put Santa out or embarrass him by asking him to wheel a cart full of Malibu around his local booze shop, so I thought my mum had a pretty good idea there. But then this radio report made me paranoid! What if… What if Santa brought me my card, but it got lost in the wrapping paper on Xmas morning and thrown away? OMG. What if somebody else picked it up by mistake and took it away with them? OMG! What if my parents, in their parental way, put away my gift card for safekeeping and forgot about it? OMG!!

According to statistics, there are about $300 worth of forgotten gift cards lying around in the average North American’s sock drawers. What do retailers think about this?

Capable of forgetting to use a gift card? I'd say so.

Well, when gift cards first became popular, retailers did worry about cards going unredeemed—but strictly from an accounting perspective. So they programmed them with expiry dates. If you forgot to clean your sock drawer for too long, then tried to buy a toaster at Sears with an old card, you were out of luck. Finally regulations were introduced prohibiting retailers from selling these suicide gift cards. And retailers weren’t too sad because they realized they were raking it in regardless of whether they programmed the cards to expire or not.

But how do retailers feel about their customers spending money but getting nothing in return?

Yo, they totally love it!! This has become an industry unto itself. Take Best Buy, a place that specializes in hosing customers by placing loud price tags on things so they look like they’re on sale when in fact they’re not. In 2006 they profited $43 million dollars from unredeemed gift cards.

All of this worried me. But my mum said she was sure I’d pester her so hard to use the card that it wouldn’t get forgotten. I guess that’s true.

So Santa, if you’re reading this, you can send a gift card if you like, so I can buy my own Goldschlager, Bacardi white rum, Bacardi 151, blackberry brandy, strawberry liqueur, banana liqueur, Hypnotiq, Malibu, Pernod, champagne, melon liqueur, Bailey’s, Crown Royal, Frangelico, peppermint schnapps, Kokanee, Capistro and Domaine D’or. But please bring some Broker’s Gin because we don’t have any at our liquor stores in BC, and Julia Gale of Broker’s didn’t offer to send me any. Oh yes—and that tequila that comes in a gun-shaped bottle. I want to try that.

Yours truly,

Liquorstore Bear