economics – Edward Trimnell Books

Debbie Gibson’s bikini and social media marketing trends

Debbie Gibson has been showing up in my personal Facebook feed of late, even though I haven’t subscribed to her, and even though I’ve never been a particular devotee of her music.

This is probably because of demographics. I’m a Gen Xer in my 50s. Debbie Gibson is a pop star from the 1980s. Therefore, Meta reasons that I should be a Debbie Gibson fan.

(And just to be clear about this: I never actively disliked Debbie Gibson or her music. But I was never really part of her target audience, either. She specialized in a brand of pop love songs that were written for 14-year-old girls enduring their first serious crushes. Debbie Gibson’s breakout year was 1988. In 1988 I was a 20-year-old male.)

This morning Debbie Gibson showed up in my Facebook feed wearing a bikini. Now once again it is necessary for me to provide a disclaimer. Gibson looks damn good in her swimwear, for a woman of any age. So there’s no “body shaming” going on here.

But the economist in me has to wonder… What compels a 55-year-old woman who has been famous for 40 years to post bikini photos of herself on social media? That might make sense for an up-and-coming, wannabe social media influencer. But Debbie Gibson, who has been famous since Ronald Reagan was in the White House?

I think it might have something to do with the way media marketing has changed since the halcyon 1980s.

Forty years ago, Debbie Gibson’s marketing cycle looked something like this:

Release an album.
Record a music video.
Appear on MTV.
Do magazine interviews.
Maybe appear on television.
Disappear until the next album.

In the old days, marketing assets were expensive to produce and deliver. Barriers to entry were high. Therefore, marketing tended to occur in high-end, highly curated campaigns.

The internet and social media all but eliminated those barriers to entry. Now everyone, from your local plumber to your next-door neighbor’s daughter, can achieve more marketing presence than would have been possible for Debbie Gibson in 1987. As a result, everyone who hawks their wares online needs to market themselves like your local plumber or your next-door neighbor’s daughter.

There is nothing conspiratorial or sinister about this. Technology and economics are doing their thing.

All of this seems second-nature to anyone under the age of 30. But to those of us who can remember the previous century well, the shift in the media landscape can often be discombobulating. I wonder if Debbie Gibson would agree.

-ET

The $1,000 Catholic High School

What Ohio’s school voucher system may have done to the cost of private education

I attended Catholic schools for most of my K–12 years.

I went to a public kindergarten. From first grade through eighth grade, I attended a parish school on the east side of Cincinnati.

I completed my high school education at a Catholic school that was also located on the east side of Cincinnati. (And, as we will shortly discuss, still is.)

I’m not here to apologize for attending Catholic schools. Nor do I have any horror stories to relate. My educational experience was almost uniformly pleasant. My teachers were dedicated, responsible adults. As for my peers—well, high school was high school—but most of them were pretty nice people, on balance.

My public school options were not horrible by the standards of the 1970s and 1980s. But I’m glad my parents spent the extra money to send me to Catholic schools.

But how much money?

When I graduated from high school in 1986, my parents were spending about $1,000 per year on my tuition. That’s about $3,100 in present-day dollars.

Tuition at the high school I attended now costs more than five times that inflation-adjusted amount. Tuition at my former high school costs about $15,000 per year. Additional fees bring the total to nearly $17,000 per year.

What the heck happened?

Back in the 1980s, tuition-based Catholic schools operated under market constraints. All private schools did, for that matter. They could charge only what families could feasibly afford. Therefore, they had to keep their operating costs in line.

In the mid-1980s, my high school had two full-time administrators. There was one full-time guidance counselor.

And that was for a student body of about two thousand kids.

The high school I attended now has fewer than half that many students. According to the internet, about 700 students now attend my alma mater.

But, as you might have guessed, my old high school now has more administrators. (In fact, one of my former classmates is the Director of Admissions there.)

I’ve also noticed that the school has gone on a building spree in recent years. When I was a student there in the 1980s, we all used more or less the same facilities that my mother and her classmates had used in the 1960s. (My mother was a 1964 graduate of the same school.) Our accommodations were comfortable, but not luxurious. (And when you’re 15, 16, or 17 years old, who really cares about plush surroundings, anyway?)

But now every alumni newsletter from my former high school seems to feature some new building project. I was last inside the school for an alumni activity about a decade ago. I could barely recognize the place.

So…what the heck happened?

Government money is what happened.

Ohio has a program called EdChoice, aka a “voucher system.” In Ohio, families can receive up to $8,408 in voucher assistance for private high school tuition.

If half of the students at my alma mater are receiving the full EdChoice stipend, that would mean an annual influx of about $2.9 million. Give that much money to any group of educational administrators, and they’ll spend like drunken sailors on shore leave.

There are two sides to the school voucher debate. The first is that school vouchers siphon money from the public school system. While that issue is well worth considering, an equally serious problem is that school vouchers can artificially inflate costs at private schools. I know—because I had a quite satisfactory educational experience at a private Catholic high school during the mid-1980s for about a fifth of its current, inflation-adjusted cost.

Government money, I should note, is not the only type of external funding that can inflate costs. I’ve noticed a sharp increase in the cost of glasses and eye care over the years. (I’ve worn prescription lenses since 1978.) A few decades ago, insurance companies were not involved in routine eye care to the extent they are today. Now they are, and the costs we all pay have risen concomitantly.

You’ve no doubt had the experience of receiving a $1,600 bill for some routine medical test. Why do these tests cost so much? Because, in most cases, an external insurance provider will ultimately be paying the bill.

Whether that insurance provider is the government or a corporation is immaterial from an inflationary standpoint. Third-party insurance payments tend to weaken the market constraints that would otherwise keep prices in check.

So do school vouchers, it seems.

Meanwhile, public education funding is in a perpetual mess here in the Buckeye State. Many of the local districts do not have regular bus service. Each year, there are rancorous debates over school levies and property taxes, which fund public schools in Ohio.

These are problems that we did not have in the 1980s. Granted, I was not a homeowner paying property taxes in 1986, but I don’t remember my parents complaining about the property taxes they shelled out. (Nowadays, everyone in Ohio grouses about how high their property taxes are.) Nor was there ever a problem providing school buses for both public school kids and parochial school kids.

I reiterate: I am not a foe of Catholic schools. On the contrary, I’m both a fan and a beneficiary of them. But they were a lot more affordable—for both parents and taxpayers—before school vouchers came into the picture.

EdChoice is not a panacea for parents. If a family receives the full $8,408 in EdChoice assistance for tuition to my old high school, that still leaves about $8,600 out of pocket. That’s an inflation-adjusted net cost of nearly three times what my parents paid in the 1980s.

—ET

Kindle Unlimited, and going where the readers are

There is a cashier at a nearby grocery store where I regularly shop. She is an avid reader of my books.

This woman (I’ll call her Beverly) is probably in her mid-forties. Like me, she has spent most of her life in Ohio.

Beverly subscribes to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program, and she reads most of my books through KU.

The other day, I asked Beverly if she did much reading on non-Amazon platforms such as Apple Books, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, or Kobo.

Beverly gave me a perplexed look.

“Why?” she asked, honestly surprised by the question. (She had never even heard of Kobo—or, at best, was only vaguely aware that it existed.)

I grew up in an era when the retail book market was wonderfully distributed and diverse. We had Waldenbooks and B. Dalton in the local mall. There were independent bookstores throughout the eastern Cincinnati suburbs where I lived. There were also at least two bookstores serving the University of Cincinnati, which I attended in the late 1980s.

When the brick-and-mortar superstores Borders and Barnes & Noble came to Cincinnati in the 1990s, the retail book market consolidated somewhat—but not all that much. There were still no online book sales, and the market was large enough to support multiple retailers.

That’s the way I prefer things to be. But as is so often the case in the twenty-first century, I find myself out of step with the times.

A few months ago, I took a handful of my ebook titles wide, meaning that I removed them from Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program (which requires exclusivity) and made them available through Google Play, Apple Books, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.

This past week, I decided to remove those books from wide distribution and place them back into Kindle Unlimited. That decision was based on sales data, as well as further analysis of broader market trends. One factor was the overwhelming cost competitiveness of Amazon’s Kindle devices.

As a result, seven of my titles will be returning to Kindle Unlimited. This process should be complete by the end of the month. It is taking longer than I expected because several of Kobo’s international bookseller partners have been slow to delist the titles, and I cannot enroll them in Kindle Unlimited until they have been fully removed from those sites.

These are the titles that will be returning to KU over the coming weeks. You can find all of them on my Amazon author page:

The Consultant
No Sure Thing
12 Hours of Halloween
Revolutionary Ghosts
Hay Moon and Other Stories
Eleven Miles of Night
Involuntary Deeds

-ET

Kindle, Kobo, my future publishing plans…and yet another 1980s metaphor

Many of you have noticed that my books are now available at multiple retailers.

But not all of my books are available at multiple retailers.

There are reasons for this. Allow me to explain.

As recently as last year, I was Amazon-exclusive on all titles (with the exception of a few non-fiction books). All of my fiction was in Kindle Unlimited.

That’s not the way it is anymore.

Why?

The publishing landscape is changing.

Amazon is still the dominant player in the ebook retailing space (and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future).

But Kobo is rapidly emerging as a viable alternative for many readers (as the video below demonstrates). Other readers will toggle back and forth between the two.

Kobo is not the only non-Amazon e-book retailer, of course. There are also Apple Books, Google Play, and Barnes & Noble.

But Kobo, with its high-profile line of e-readers, seems to be the one that is making the most headway. Kobo is serious about increasing its market share.

Where readers go, authors will follow, and vice versa.

The wild card here is Kindle Unlimited’s exclusivity clause. If a title is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, it can’t be sold (in ebook format) at any of the other retailers. Historically, this has meant that thousands of titles listed at Amazon aren’t available at Kobo, Google Play, etc.

Many readers, I suspect, aren’t even aware of this.

I’ve noticed a trend: More romance authors are publishing their books “wide”, with an emphasis on Kobo.

Yes, romance… the genre that dare not speak its name at this blog. Regular readers will know how I hate werebear shapeshifter romance, reverse harem romance, and all the other ridiculous romance genres.

But I don’t deny their collective footprint in the marketplace. Those weird romance genres, much as I disdain them, may be instrumental in propelling Kobo’s growth in the near future.

This will indirectly benefit the other non-Amazon retailers—not only Kobo. Because if you’re publishing your book on Kobo, then you had might as well publish it on Google Play, Apple Books, and Barnes & Noble too.

Readers will go where the books go. This is the network effect in action.

But for me, publishing wide doesn’t mean abandoning Kindle Unlimited. I will still be keeping many backlist and new titles in Amazon’s exclusive subscription program.

Yes—I know that means that those titles will only be available at Amazon. But Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program is a major player in its own right. In my opinion, part of being “wide” means having a footprint in Kindle Unlimited.

This diversified strategy may strike some readers as needlessly complicated. But remember: I’m from the 1980s. And back in the 1980s, content publishers regularly thought in terms of market segmentation.

For example: there were movies and TV shows that were available on network television for free.

Other movies and shows were available on HBO (a subscription program).

Others required viewers to access them via a pay-per-view system.

Then there were all those VHS rentals.

And finally, there were movies that could only be seen at the cinema.

I’m doing something very similar. Some of my titles are exclusively at Amazon, other titles are “wide”.

Nor have I forgotten about free, frictionless discovery venues: I’ve also been adding readings of some of my books and stories to my YouTube channel.

The 2026 content distribution marketplace is complicated; but in some ways, it’s no more convoluted than it was in 1986. So we go back to the 1980s yet again.

-ET

Homeschooling: the wrong solution to a real problem

A large number of school levy issues were on the ballot throughout Ohio this past Tuesday. Most of them were rejected by voters. Reading the comments on Facebook, I noted that those who voted against the levies were largely unapologetic.

There is a general dissatisfaction throughout America with public schools: their management, their methods of (taxpayer) funding, and the instruction that is taking place within them.

This dissatisfaction with public education has fueled a concomitant rise in homeschooling. When I was a kid, during the 1970s and 1980s, one never met anyone who was homeschooled. (Fewer than 1% of Gen Xers receive their education this way.) But nowadays it seems that every other young adult one meets is the product of homeschooling. Every young couple with children is at least talking about educating their kids at home. The percentages rise as the neighborhoods become whiter and more affluent.

I understand the dissatisfaction with twenty-first-century public schools. It seems that no news day is complete without a fresh report of some weirdness being taught in public schools, or some flagrant example of teacher misconduct.

And yet…I had a very different experience in the 1970s and 1980s. I attended both public and working-class Catholic schools, both at the grade school and high school levels. I received an excellent education. And while I liked some of my teachers better than others, almost all of them were intelligent adults who were deeply committed to their calling.

What happened, then? Sometime during the mid-1980s, one began hearing the catchphrase, “if you can’t do, then teach”. The careerism of the 1980s taught young people that teaching was a second-rate profession. If you were smart, if you were a capable student, then you didn’t want to be a teacher. No, that simply wouldn’t do. You had to be an attorney, a CPA, or a CEO.

Another important trend occurred during the Gen X growing-up years: a decline in the number of capable young women entering the teaching field.

As recently as the 1970s, teaching was considered a top career choice for the most capable young women. While some of my teachers were male, they were disproportionately female. Many of my female teachers were absolutely brilliant. My junior high science teacher, a woman named Mrs. Tierney, was as knowledgable as many college professors.

That all began to change in the 1980s, with the rise of “girl power”, and the idea that the brightest young women must compete in all traditionally male careers. The result was more intelligent young women working in law and finance, but fewer intelligent young women becoming math and science teachers.

Did society benefit most from more intelligent young women entering law firms…or from more intelligent young women entering the field of education? I’m going to let you draw your own conclusions on that one. (I don’t want to deal with the hate mail.)

What I will say is that there are trade-offs to all societal changes. Forty years ago, we began subtly denigrating the teaching profession (“if you can’t do, then teach”) and we began telling young women that they were passively accepting the patriarchy if they didn’t go toe-to-toe with their male classmates in the corporate boardroom.

Forty years have come and gone since all of those trends began. The excellent teachers who provided my education during the 1970s and 1980s are all retired. After casting the teaching profession as a second-rate career choice for four decades, many people are shocked to discover that—lo and behold—the field is now populated by mostly second-rate people. (In one of their Freakonomics books, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner documented the decline in teacher IQ within my lifetime.) Many parents are also shocked to discover that a disproportionate number of those teachers are left-wing ideologues who shouldn’t be trusted with anyone’s children. But that tends to go along with the second-rate thing.

And now many of those affluent white suburbanites have decided that public schools must be abandoned wholesale. Parents who once believed that a teaching career was beneath them have decided that they should take a break from their law firms and corporate offices to…educate their children at home. Can no one see the irony here?

I reiterate: I experienced public, industrialized education during the 1970s and 1980s. It really isn’t that bad when the right adults are in charge. The problem is that the right adults are no longer in charge, because the right adults are off doing other things. Among those other things (note irony once again) is now homeschooling their kids, because they no longer trust the people working in education.

I am grateful that I wasn’t homeschooled. I loved my mother dearly, but she would not have been capable of teaching me Spanish and algebra at home. In my experience, very few parents are well-equipped to provide competent instruction beyond the fifth- or sixth- grade level. Teaching at the junior high level and above really is a task that is best left to trained professionals.

The proof is in the pudding. I’ve met many of these young adults who were homeschooled in recent years. Most of them are nice enough, but there are noticeable gaps in their knowledge and social development. I would not have wanted to trade places with them.

Another important factor is the socialization and people skills that the organized educational experience provides. I was neither the captain of the football team nor the most popular kid in my school. But my high school experience was anything but four years of living hell. In fact, I rather enjoyed it.

More germane to our discussion here, my school years taught me about friends, enemies, rivals, and conflict management. These are skills that many screen-bound Gen Z young adults sorely lack.

The solution to the crisis in public education is not for a million concerned parents to isolate their children and retreat behind suburban walls. The solution is for a million concerned parents to become involved and take back their public schools.

This is not like trying to take back the national government. Education is still largely managed at the local level. It is possible for organized groups of adults to bring about substantial changes.

This would be a lot more beneficial (for their children, most of all), and practical, than for every parent to try to become a do-it-yourself calculus teacher.

-ET

Draft 2 Digital, AI slop, and the evil necessity of publishing fees

Draft 2 Digital is a company that provides indie authors and small publishers with a single interface for “wide” distribution of ebooks to a host of online retailers. The company has historically taken a small percentage of sales revenues in exchange for its services.

But in recent years, AI slop has invaded and overwhelmed the publishing world. There is now an entire online ecosystem of low-content and junk content churned out by AI writing tools. This “book spam” is clogging up online bookstores and retailers with content that no one is ever going to buy in any meaningful quantity. And with AI tools, the book spammers can do this at scale.

To make matters worse, there is also now an ecosystem of YouTube and TikTok hucksters, teaching others how to “make millions!” with these techniques. This is like the content farm problem of the 00s, but exponentially larger.

Draft2Digital has addressed the problem in a number of ways. Some time ago, the company announced that it will no longer handle nonfiction titles covering topics that are low-hanging fruit for spammers (exercise, cryptocurrency, diet, and various New Age subject matter).

D2D also announced that it will begin charging a $20 set-up fee for new accounts, along with a $12 per year account maintenance fee for any publishers who earn less than $100 per year.

In other words, less than $8.33 per month.

Needless to say, there are people kvetching about this on the Internet. As for me, I am 100% in favor of it.

This is not because I want to see more fees for their own sake. But rather because something needs to be done about the sheer volume of online garbage.

And when I use terms like “online garbage”, I’m not talking about stories and books that don’t suit my taste. Hey, if someone has labored over their billionaire, reverse-harem cowboy hockey player romance novel, and they want to publish that, let them go for it. (Although to be perfectly honest, I would prefer that they didn’t. The romance genres have become as trashy as Pornhub in recent years. But I digress.)

I’m talking, rather, about the low-content and extremely low-effort books produced, often with AI tools, for the sole purpose of manipulating bookstore algorithms and exploiting subscription services like Kindle Unlimited. No one benefits from the presence of that—including the authors of billionaire, reverse-harem cowboy hockey player romance novels.

A modest per-book monthly or annual nuisance fee would prune the sheer volume of junk that is accumulating on online bookstores. (Listen to Mal Cooper’s video below.)

I know the nature of the internet. There are people out there who believe that anything on the Internet should always be free, no matter what it is, and no matter what costs are associated with it, simply because it’s on the Internet. That’s an argument that goes back at least 25 years, to the original debates over file-sharing and NAPSTER.

But AI slop threatens to undermine, if not destroy, indie publishing. Online retailers and distributors will never have the manpower to meticulously vet every title. In lieu of that, per-title maintenance fees may be a necessary evil for combating AI slop.

-ET

TERMINATION MAN: Corporate HR represents your employer, not you

TERMINATION MAN is the story of Craig Walker, a management consultant who specializes in “removing” problem employees through entrapment and techniques of “social engineering”.

TERMINATION MAN is fiction, but it is based on my experience in the automotive industry. The novel’s premise also has a basis in HR practices.

“Managing out” is a common corporate HR practice. When an employee is “managed out”, her situation is made so unpleasant or unsustainable that she will effectively fire herself, and voluntarily resign. This saves the company hassle and expense on multiple levels.

TERMINATION MAN is an embellishment of the managing out practice, of course. But the principle exists, and all HR professionals are familiar with it.

Another thing to remember: corporate HR is not your friend. Corporate HR does not represent you. Corporate HR represents your employer, the company.

This doesn’t mean that corporate HR reps are automatically sinister, venal, etc. (Most are not.) But you should never forget who pays their salaries. (Hint: not you.)

-ET

**View TERMINATION MAN ON AMAZON**

The end of MTV (1981 – 2025)

December 31st marked not only the end of 2025, but also the end of MTV (1981 – 2025).

As I explain in the video below, I was one of MTV’s young fans back in the early 1980s.

MTV was a brilliant mechanism for content marketing. Suburban teens like me would discover new bands on MTV. Then we would go to the local mall and purchase the albums.

I discovered many of my favorite bands on MTV, including Def Leppard.

-ET

**View NO SURE THING: A GEN X COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL SET IN 1988 on Amazon**

1980s tech was expensive, and it didn’t do much

I vaguely remember the TRS-80 Pocket Computer. Introduced in 1980, this little device was manufactured and marketed by the Tandy Corporation/Radio Shack. (Every shopping mall in the 1980s had a Radio Shack.) Science fiction author Isaac Asimov appeared in a series of marketing spots for the gadget.

1980 Radio Shack ad featuring the TRS-80 Pocket Computer and Isaac Asimov

I didn’t own a TRS-80 Pocket Computer, however. The MSRP was $169.95. In present-day money, that’s about $670—the cost of a base-model iPhone.

And of course, the TRS-80 Pocket Computer had a minimal functionality when compared to an iPhone. It couldn’t make phone calls, play music, or take photos. It couldn’t surf the Internet—which didn’t yet exist, anyway.

The TRS-80 Pocket Computer was programmable in BASIC (which couldn’t do much for the average consumer). Other than that, it was basically a glorified pocket calculator.

Herein lies an important realization about 1980s tech: it was very expensive, and it didn’t do much. Even if you could afford it, you usually concluded that you could do without it.

-ET

The comparative joys of old (1980s) movies

I have been watching some old movies from the 1980s recently. Some have been movies that I saw, but have long since forgotten. Others are iconic films of that era that I never got around to seeing when they were current.

For example, I recently wrote a post about Mystic Pizza (1988). Last night I watched Risky Business (1983). I will have a post about Risky Business soon.

One thing I’ve noticed is that many films created in 1980-something as disposable teen comedies were actually pretty good. In 1985, did anyone imagine that people in 2025 would still be talking about The Breakfast Club? Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) has been recognized by the American Film Institute for its merits.

Another thing I’ve noticed is the diversity in movies from that bygone era. In 1985, an original movie, properly executed, could make a lot of people rich. But the economics of the 21^st-century box office encourage conservatism and a tiresome emphasis on franchise films. Continue reading “The comparative joys of old (1980s) movies”

Stephen King’s ‘The Outsider’ in Kindle Unlimited

While poking around on Amazon this morning, I noticed that the electronic version of Stephen King’s 2018 novel, The Outsider, is now available in Kindle Unlimited (KU). This means that subscribers to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program can read the electronic version of the book for free.

(Note: At least for now. Kindle Unlimited terms run for a period of 90 days. So if you’re reading this post a year from now, The Outsider may or may not be in KU.)

Amazon launched its Kindle Unlimited program more than a decade ago. Since its inception, there have been arguments for and against the program.

On one hand, Kindle Unlimited is to books what Netflix is to movies. KU thereby allows subscribers to discover new books and authors for free (aside from the KU subscription fee).

On the other hand, Kindle Unlimited requires books to be exclusive to the Amazon platform. (More on this shortly.) This creates a “network effect” that arguably disadvantages other stores like Apple Books and Kobo.

Another concern with Kindle Unlimited is that it tends to be skewed toward certain kinds of genre fiction, like romance, urban fantasy, and space opera. In the past, critics of the program (mostly book reviewers) have complained that Kindle Unlimited doesn’t contain enough titles from bestselling, household-name authors.

Well, you can’t get any more household-name than Stephen King. If a Stephen King title is available in Kindle Unlimited, then the program has all the bona fides it needs.

There is one important catch, however. And this quibble comes (mostly) from the perspective of an independent author/publisher like me.

The Outsider is still available on other platforms, like Kobo and Apple Books. (I checked.) Stephen King’s title is not subject to the normal rules of KU exclusivity.

This is an important exception. If I place a book in Kindle Unlimited, I have to agree to make it exclusive to Amazon (not available anywhere else) for a period of 90 days. This means that readers can’t find it on other platforms, and I can’t sell it on other platforms during the Kindle Unlimited enrollment period.

So Stephen King gets different, more preferential treatment at Amazon than I do. I’m neither outraged nor surprised. Having spent many years in the corporate world, I know how the corporate world works.

As someone once told me, many years ago: “Rank and status have perks.” At the time, we were discussing the egalitarian implications of reserved parking spaces for top managers in the company parking lot. The corporate world is far from egalitarian. It would be naive to think that book publishing and retailing are “special” in this regard. Business is business.

On the contrary, I might benefit from this. The placement of The Outsider in Kindle Unlimited will bring new horror fans into the subscription program. After they’re done reading The Outsider, some of them may read one of my horror novels, like 12 Hours of Halloween, Revolutionary Ghosts, or Kuwa 6226. They may even give my historical horror series, The Rockland Horror, a try.

Yes, that was a little self-promotional plug, tongue-in-cheek though it was. Like I said: Business is business.

-ET

1980: a shave with your Egg McMuffin?

This is a promotional ad that McDonald’s ran in 1980. Breakfast customers were given a free Bic razor with the purchase of any breakfast entree.

I don’t specifically remember this promotion, and my guess is that it didn’t last long. This is also one that you’re unlikely to see repeated in the twenty-first century. Clearly the ad appeals to one specific gender. (And in 1980, no one disputed the notion that there were only two.) But as we all know, women eat pancakes, too. So what’s going on?

My mother worked outside the home in 1980; but that was the very beginning of the Boomer-led “working woman” trend of the 1980s. The McDonald’s marketing folks probably figured that men would comprise the main market for fast-food breakfasts, presumably on their way to work.

-ET