Curse of the Weather Wolf

Goodbye winter weather. I will not miss you. I was seriously thinking for next year, we should just close for January and February instead of enduring the misery that these two months hold. Call it a “self sequester” if you will. Reminiscent of the little ice cream stands that used to close for the winter months. There is something about foul winter weather that abates the craving for a banana split, and surprisingly enough, equally reduces the urge to have a new set of ceramic brake pads installed. Arguably, this past January and February were the worst doldrums of winter we have ever endured in almost 20 years of business.

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The interesting thing about this time of year seems to be that we all find a sadomasochistic solace when we find out that everyone is just as slow as we are. Misery loves company, and other jobbers and service centers call me to commiserate. Good grief, we debase ourselves to the point of a leper colony comparing new lesions and which toes and fingers have recently fallen off. The ‘Joy Luck Club’ it ain’t.

So, what’s to blame? The economy? The President? The House and the Senate? Taxes? Insurance companies? Competition? Well, yes to all of the above, but there is another element.

Let’s face it, the economy has always been bouncing around like a ping pong ball, our Presidents throughout history have influenced our business by pushing wacky legislation, our Congressmen and Senators are a bunch of wimpy cry-babies who can’t get along, taxes will never cease, insurance companies are a necessary evil, and we’ve always had competition.

What’s the one compelling thing that has affected the psyche of our clientele more than all of the above? It’s a subtle, yet quirky new practice of the Weather Channel and national weather service naming every dark cloud in the sky. Naming hurricanes makes sense because they are catastrophic events that are usually recorded historically, and the name of the storm provides a dated reference point associated with the name. Sort of like naming your children on the day they were born.

Personally, I have a hard enough time remembering the birthdays of my named children, and just think, if you referred to your kids as this one, that one, him, her, and the other one, not only would they never get a birthday present, their significance in your life is reduced to a third-person pronoun. If you name something, that something takes on an omnipresent life of it’s own.

As a result of this insanity, my customers will put-off getting their oil changed because Winter Snow Squall Edgar just laid down a half-inch of snow in Nashville, Tenn. They would rather stay home watching the news guys predict how many car crashes will occur in Nashville during rush hour because the City of Nashville only has two plow trucks, three snow shovels, and a 40-pound bag of salt that has hardened into a cake because it’s 4 years old.

At this rate, look for weather events with names such as this: “Heavy Dew Norman,” “Light Drizzle Maggie” and “Partly Cloudy Roxanne.”  Kudos to the weather channel and national weather service taking otherwise non-eventful weather and trivializing those happenings to a ridiculous level, giving them names, cooing about them endlessly on the air, and thus turning them into entertaining normal weather occurrences that keep my prospective customers glued to the television giddy about a dense fog weather advisory named Oscar.

Getting a warm couch potato to miss out on this sublime infotainment is our real challenge, and I have a few plans to encourage people to see me during January and February of next year.

Promotion #1 – If you share the first name of a named weather event, you get a 25 percent discount. Not really that risky for me, because I only know a few people named Betelguise or Malaki.

Promotion #2 – Free oil change for everyone whose silhouette closely resembles any cumulous cloud of “Periods of Rain Leopold.” 

Promotion #3 – 50 percent off wiper blades for all customers whose hair style is unaffected by “Gusty Winds Artemus.”  This one will be subjective to our own sense of fashion.

Promotion #4 – 10 percent off any product or service if school in your city or county was called off or delayed by “Heavy Frost Icarus.” This happens a lot, and we quite possibly could be inundated with business as school administrators obviously are avid fans of weather forecasters, and easily whipped into a fearsome frenzy. Heck, what happened to the days of walking up hill both ways both ways to school, shoeless, and in 3 feet of snow?

It’s not out of the ordinary for January and February to be slow, but that gives us no reason to lament the situation, and refer to it as normal for this time of year. Look what the Weather Channel did to normal. They made it super-normal, glitzed and glammed it up, and it works!

We know this time of year is coming every season, and it’s high time we all try something different to motivate our customers. Turn normally bad into extraordinary awful, and promote it. Since it seems our clientele likes bad news, advertise Mundane Monday, Trying Tuesday, Woeful Wednesday, Terrible Thursday, Frightful Friday and Senseless to be here Saturday.  Appropriate specials and offers should accompany each. It’s ok to draw outside the lines every now and then, at least in our neck of the woods.

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