“Where your next chapter begins.” That was the subject line of Lisa’s email from Hawk Ranch. Her email continued: “Picture yourself among a cluster of trees that sway gently in the breeze. Look past the lush, green backdrop to our beautiful pond….” Reading this opening, I’m left questioning the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign for a wedding venue – or at the very least the logistics and target metrics for such a campaign. I signed up to receive emails from Hawk Ranch back in February or March of 2019. The planning stopped in April. Hawk Ranch hasn’t sent me very many emails – maybe six or ten in the past two years? That’s probably how they got through the unsubscribe purges of 2020 and 2021 – they hadn’t hit my radar. But again, do people choose wedding venues because you describe trees swaying in a breeze? Is the goal to get them to take another look – you know, in case they were on the rustic but elegant fence…
I wanted to write more about that, to mix in humor and a little snark, but I’m realizing I’m just not very good at being that writer. I also realized I was putting much more thought (probably) in to their marketing campaign than they were. Though who knows maybe Lisa sweats and revises and adds and edits and then nervously hits send each time…. Well, this time, I unsubscribed.
This is what I do when I want to spend some time writing, but don’t know what to write about. I go in search of insights and outrages. Though I think for my own well-being, I’d be better off finding insights – the world is full of everyday outrages. At some point I wanted to write about Charles Bukowski – it was his birthday the other day and I read a bit about him on Brain Pickings. And a few days ago I wanted to write about ibuying, the trend in which Zillow and other tech companies are purchasing up housing stock. It was the outrage of the day for me – entirely too aggravating to write about – yet another example of how big money is making commodities and profits at scale on our basic necessities. I think what really galled me was the one quote from Zillow:
Viet Shelton, a Zillow spokesperson, told Motherboard that the company is hopeful that with enough growth, “this business model can generate immense profits even if the profit per home isn’t eye-popping to the casual investor or analyst.” (Zillow’s gross profit per home sold was $33,849 in the second quarter, according to the company.) “Putting it to scale gets very, very interesting,” he added. “Buying and selling 5,000 homes a month? It gets interesting,”
Never mind that buying a home, at least for many people, especially first time home-buyers, is one of the more significant and stressful purchases they will ever make…. but for Zillow, putting it to scale gets interesting. It’s a punchable quote.
As the business world hails innovation and disruption, I often wonder if the investors and disruptors ever think about the people on the other end… the collateral damage. It pushes my buttons to see someone so casually talking about hoarding resources for profit as though they’re pokemon cards (or something like that).
That was where I stopped writing… I had opened up the article to pull the quote and felt… something between aggravated and dismayed all over again. Human avarice has that effect on me. I take phone calls from people asking for a little help because they’re staying in a hotel and the money is running out, and I have to say sorry, there’s nothing we can do. Meanwhile some spokesperson in a corporate office thinks it gets very interesting when they can flip houses at scale….
I probably should have written about Bukowski or maybe stuck with the snarky analysis of the Hawk Ranch email marketing campaign. When I started this post, I was just trying to cobble something (anything) together – to get back in the habit and overcome any sense of real purpose in writing. Once, when asked how do you write, Bukowski replied “You don’t…. You don’t try…. you wait.”