[/caption]Two happenings got me thinking this week.
First, the scam. I got the email from a client. It said Talbots is closing all its stores. And J.Jill. Ann Taylor - 117 stores closing. There was more, but I couldn't see past the tears. After all, I am slightly petite. 5 feet nothing, actually. And like many women, I've learned where I should shop and where I shouldn't. I should shop at Talbots, Ann Taylor and J.Jill.The good news? The email was a fake. Thank heaven! I figured it out before I emptied the stores of everything I could squeeze into.
Second, the reformation. Last night I attended an outstanding event sponsored in part by a client, FieldEddy Insurance. John Zogby, pollster, spoke about his new book The Way We'll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream. John says Americans will focus less on material things (in part because many of us have gone downhill, shall we say, in financial terms). We'll want our tombstones to say more than that we spent "37 years in a cubicle." Also, a million people now approaching 60 will live to be 100! He adds that we'll NEED to live that long if we want ever to retire.
Seriously, he makes some great points: that more isn't always meaningful, that we're tired of fake and want authenticity (he pointed to the Dove ad campaign for real beauty, with ads that feature women with real, lovely but imperfect bodies, as an example of how wildly successful that approach can be). IN FACT, we're so sick of the meaningless and the trivial that we didn't care about Bill Ayers or "lipstick on a pig" in the recent election. No, we wanted some real help and a real transformation.
