quick-hands
Footballguy
I knew what you meant. I thought it was funny. But nutmegA could be a better delivery. We can work on it
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Penzey's Spice CEO: "Republicans are racists" (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter parasaurolophus
- Start date
GordonGekko
Footballguy
That's a really excellent question that will sadly be widely avoided and/or ignored here.
Also neighbors, friends since childhood, family members, possibly children if any are grown, people who helped his dad build that business up from the ground along the way, etc, etc.
Here's another, if he needed a life saving kidney transplant, and he found out the donor, a perfect match, was a Republican, would he turn it down?
The General
Footballguy
GordonGekko
Footballguy
The problem he's going to have is that there will be Republican elements that will scour every aspect of his life and his immediate family lives for anything tied to racism. If they find anything, they'll submit it to the press and then turn it over to Black Lives Matter.
From a media optics standpoint, if you turn it over to BLM in public in the national daily media cycle and BLM as an organization ignores it, then that punishes BLM's image.
If BLM persecutes and attempts to cancel Penzey then it represents the "left eating it's own" in said same national daily media cycle.
"Shock Marketing" always requires a company go through a hard vetting first. That's always the first step. But not everyone thinks of it nor does it.
"Black Bag" media optics would be far more aggressive in spinning the narrative on Penzey. Honestly he's lucky people like myself aren't working for RNC HQ. Not because they aren't that ruthless but because the best overall media optics talent wants nothing to do with professional politics.
BladeRunner
Footballguy
Not to mention, how many people has he not hired or fired because they were conservative?
Seems to me he's setting himself up for a massive discrimination lawsuit. And a well deserved one, too.
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The General
Footballguy
BladeRunner
Footballguy
Can you hire/fire someone for their political beliefs in this country? I thought that was protected.
The General
Footballguy
sho nuff
Footballguy
KarmaPolice
Footballguy
Pickle Rody
IBL Representative
bigbottom
Footballguy
It’s not protected under federal law. In California, New York and DC, you can’t discriminate in employment decisions against someone on the basis of their political affiliation. I do not believe that such a law exists in Wisconsin (where Penzey Spice is headquartered).
dkp993
Footballguy
GordonGekko
Footballguy
Make "Conservatism" a religion.
That should throw a wrinkle into Title VII. SCOTUS ruled on Bostock last year and there is still a political component to how far these definitions are going to get parsed out. Waters V Churchill will negate the cost argument.
The trigger point for SCOTUS will always be individual legacy. That trigger gets tested once political tribalism starts to spin out of control into widespread fractured violence. The pathway to that is not some kind of wild leap. Look at the last two years in terms of "civil order"
The fatal flaw of the American legal profession is the overwhelming number of narcissists in it's ranks. Threaten the narcissist's public reputation and watch how quickly the legal rationalizations happen. Dirt washes off a lot easier than blood.
quick-hands
Footballguy
He might but they keep their opinions to themselves or get fired. I'm sure everyone knows his position and expects lock step agreement
The General
Footballguy
Summer Wheat
Footballguy
Penzeys comments are rooted in hate, ignorance. and intolerance. It if he said "Blacks are thieves" "Muslims hate Jews" Or any comment about any group. Would it be acceptable today?
Sweeping generalization are dangerous because it they can be inappropriate, inapplicable, irrelevant, or it might even be harmful for a specific group, a particular situation.
Also, they are typically inflexible and resistant to new information. They can, and often do, lead to prejudice and intentional or unintentional discrimination.
Sweeping generalization are dangerous because it they can be inappropriate, inapplicable, irrelevant, or it might even be harmful for a specific group, a particular situation.
Also, they are typically inflexible and resistant to new information. They can, and often do, lead to prejudice and intentional or unintentional discrimination.
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Stealthycat
Footballguy
love their products, visited their Memphis and Dallas stores several times
never again - thanks for posting this
never again - thanks for posting this
James Daulton
Footballguy
Grace Under Pressure
Footballguy
What a dope.
Godsbrother
Footballguy
Agree 1000%. I love Penzey's products but have stopped going there because of their continual trashing of the right. It is extremely divisive and I don't like it.
I want spices, I have no interest in what the owner of Penzey's thinks.
Pickle Rody
IBL Representative
I don't recall these spices being available where I am but, I wouldn't purchase them due to the owners open propensity for irrational generalizations. The likely prohibitive prices would've had me steering clear initially but his recent comments would have sealed the deal. Just like DJT's multiple and continued divisive comments sealed the deal for me in opposing him after initially thinking I'd give him the opportunity to be presidential.
FairWarning
Footballguy
Republicans buy spices also.
Do we have to support Big Spices now?
Do we have to support Big Spices now?
Da Guru
Fair & Balanced
I guess Penzey thinks more division, intolerance and hate is good for his business. In this climate I would think the opposite would be better..or just say nothing.
rustycolts
Footballguy
As long as they don't make Everglades seasoning I'm good. Sure would hate to stop using my favorite seasoning.
The Big Donkey
Footballguy
Yeah, don't know anything about the company, but its pretty standard for successful businesses to give back, initiate and take responsibility for the company’s effects on environmental and social wellbeing.
This is the opposite IMO ...and for profit which is really ####ty.
GordonGekko
Footballguy
Joe Bryant said:
This is a more than fair question.
In general, on the average, the best pathway to long term success in a media optics career is to work for a brand and not any specific individual. I'll use a cross over sports example.
Rich Paul was LeBron James' best friend and when LBJ was signed by Creative Artist Agency and Nike, LeQuit simply refused to drop him. And this was a rare case where the athlete had so much leverage that everyone else had to accommodate the situation.
In most cases, Rich Paul's best pathway would have been to work his way up the Nike or CAA food chain and then be assigned to a high profile client. He would then having the backing of an entire agency if the athlete decided to go rogue. He would also have the logistical support of the agency ( legal, marketing, branding, security, financial, fixers, information brokers, contacts with other power players in other industries, etc, etc)
And in most cases, the best case scenario for Paul would be a phantom job or being co-opted into the larger agency where he would be neutered from any real influence. This happened with Adidas and Derrick Rose, they simply rolled his brother Reggie Rose into the larger contract to neutralize his influence on his brother. The worst case scenario is the high profile athlete would be convinced to drop Paul completely.
Professional politicians are individual entities. You can spend your entire career and lots of attrition and watch that effort be set on fire. Gary Hart is one example. I'll give some current examples. Gavin Newsom was once seen as a rising star for the Democratic Party, his EScores with middle aged women were off the chart. But he slept with his campaign manager's wife in SF. And he was bracketed into a 2nd affair just recently. And a lot of his political leverage comes from "Aunt" Nancy Pelosi and no one knows how long she will live. If you gave your career to Newsom, he's done his part to make it much harder to get some return on the investment. However if he wins POTUS in 2024, his closest loyalists and staffers will get their massive payoff. They now are the gatekeepers to POTUS and in his inner circle. Ted Cruz's day of reckoning happened when Trump insulted his wife and then, in a very Mark Burnett style move, Trump cut a deal with him in private. While there are all kinds of problems for Cruz otherwise in his chase for POTUS, that was a singular catastrophic moment as it relegated him into a different tier of political hierarchy . All his loyalists and staffers had to watch his rising star fade out and their stars faded with it.
In general, with politicians, here is the push/pull
Women candidates are close to impossible to get into the type of sexual scandals that are common for male candidates. However they age out quickly and the it's like falling off a cliff. The term is used in many other forms with women, but it's called "Hitting The Wall" Kristi Noem is 50 years old. She's outside her practical political window to rise further. Her EScores with men are predictably tanking. Nikki Haley is 49 but is in a much better position, but she needs to run in 2024, it's then or never for her. There's a saying for women, you can choose to age "in the face or in the body, but you have to pick one of them" An aging woman can gain weight. And that will fill out her face and she won't look as old ( relatively) but that extra weight on her body will make her body look past it's relative prime. Or an aging woman can stay trim and fit, in which case her body will look relatively younger with heavily curated stylistic choices, but her face will thin out and show her advanced age. What someone like Noem will do is simply have work done. It's not uncommon for women in politics to have minor plastic surgery or do Botox or the like. The problem is age is universally held against women in just about every career and social context. I generally don't comment too much here in the PSF on aesthetics of politicians, but it makes a difference. If you look "plastic", your media coverage and your talking points won't change that everything starts to lend of perception of insincerity. I.E. "That's not your real face, and those aren't your real words" It's quite brutal but it's just how it works. The unspoken reality of media optics and aging women, even in politics, is the practical turnover rate is carried over from the pornography industry. "Starlets" have a 4-6 month window at best on the average. Some with a little luck can drive that to about two years. I'm sure some here can cite what appears to be an outlier, but those are massive exceptions to the rule.
Male candidates don't have the age/aesthetic issue in the same manner of punitive effect but they are beholden to some type of career accomplishment. Beto O'Rourke is a failed musician who drifted from a couple of family protected jobs. Now he's a perennial candidate. He doesn't have the cache of a Mark Kelley or a Dan Crenshaw or a Ted Cruz or an Amy Klobuchar or even an Elizabeth Warren. Someone who did something respected and was seen as successful at it outside of politics and before politics. Lauren Boebert being a former assistant manager at a McDonalds is just not seen publicly in the same light if that was true for Jim Jordan. It's not fair but it's just how it works. Male candidates are also not beholden to their partners having some type of political value. It's not critical for Ted Cruz's wife to be a career success or have some type of access point to help his campaign. It's actually a big deal that Riley Roberts is a complete political zero and can't help AOC in any possible way in terms of media optics.
The majority of elected officials are NOT "brand name" politicians who can enter easily into the national daily media cycle. They are beholden to meeting their "burn rate" ( their projected daily expenditures to run their campaign) by being protected by the larger Party apparatus, thus they are effectively controlled. Modern politics for no names is like being in a painful Game Of Thrones style feudal system. If you work media optics for a no name, you have no real choice and no real options, you are always hamstrung by the will of the "messaging" and "platform" of the larger Party apparatus in place. Lots of Democrats knew "Defund The Police" was stupid and would cost them votes and elections, but everyone had to bite their tongue because they would get cut off financially and from Party support otherwise. If you work for a more successful "name brand" politician, odds are they have won before and most of the time, they won't listen to their media optics people. This is kind of like Dwayne Wade when he refused to lose weight and learn to shoot an effective three point shot and stop crying about foul calls he didn't get, he refused to adapt to the new changing environment where he's not the same player anymore. You see it with Trump, he keeps his non stop attacking everything style when it's actually harmful for his political future ( what's left of it) But it's what got him "there" in the first place and most people don't want to give that up.
The money isn't that great. Not if you work 18 hours a day, 7 days a week and it consumes you life. And any scandal could end your primary politician's career and yours with it. You can be fired and replaced at any time or blamed for something you didn't even do wrong. There's no job security, no pension plan, no fall back for you. For most, you are told what to say and how to say it and when to say it. You also have to become attuned to multiple complex topics at depth. Finance, law, elections, marketing, media advertising, abortion, gun control, immigration, criminal justice reform, education, foreign policy, the military, etc, etc, etc. While I'm hard on Jen Psaki, I don't think most people understand that she and types like Kayleigh McEnany have to grind out an entire range of complex areas of politics enough to talk about them. They also have to try to clean up messes where sometimes there is no answer to defend what's going on. That means a non stop level of attrition to cover topics that the person has to become a subject matter expert on very quickly. I think something that pushes people into the "Gekko is an alias run by multiple people" comes from my ability to cover a massive number of complex topics in depth and at different angles outside the MSM. Well I have decades of experience, much of it OUTSIDE the age of information and the Internet and social media. I have decades understanding how the media markets work and how specific demographics and locations work. This is a massive advantage over someone like Psaki because I'm just very much older and have more industry time invested. ( Well she also sucks at her job, there's that) But with age comes the inability to have that youthful vigor for that kind of attrition.
There's a sweet spot where you are old enough to have experience in enough areas to be lethal at the media game but young enough where you can eat a 18 hour a day/7 day a week grind for years to come. Can you imagine how hard some people work only to watch all their prospects and sacrifice go up in flames because someone like Newsom can't keep his #### in his pants when he's around a bunch of groupies he put on as fringe staffers?
If you work for Nike and they send you to their golf division, you can just focus on golf. How many nutty golfing scandals happen every year? I'm not saying it's free of pressure or it's easier, but something to factor in is that professional politicians come in a very small range of predictable sociopaths/psychopaths/BPD/narcissists/bi-polar, etc, etc, etc.
Is there an exception to the rule? Right now, AOC. She is financially independent from the Party apparatus but she has even worse pressure than someone who makes their living on social media monetization via ebb and flow shock marketing. She's young enough to have a future and she taps into the millennial base and she can still have children. Her platform has grown exponentially and she can enter the national daily media cycle at will in her early 30s. And she has zero clue about functional governance, basic resource management and public policy. If I ran her media optics, if she became POTUS, I would, by default, run the entire country. Think of it like an NFL capologist expert. While the owner and GM and head coach all say this and that about who they want and who need to sign or resign or acquire, the cap guy says we can or can't make the money work. The cap guy becomes the green light or the veto and thus becomes the default dominant figure in the room. This is why some cap guys rise up to become GMs or personnel chiefs across all major sports. AOC can attract high level talent because she has a ton of future upside, an existing growing platform and she is easy to control. The way age punishes women won't impact her for 4-5 general cycles. Also as a minority woman, the age effect has a slower drop off than Caucasian women ( That's pretty brutal but that's just how it works. White women on the average tend to show age on camera more drastically than many minority women)
For some, working in professional politics was something they fell into and can't get out. But for people with real options in media optics, it's not their first choice nor best choice most of the time. But there are some people who aren't as talented and have fewer connections and upside and working in politics is about their practical ceiling. Jen Psaki gets paid a government paycheck even when she fails ( that's quite often) but if she walked into the private section without the pork inherent to her political pathway, she would have a much harder time. Lots of school teachers are quite liberal. Especially those with tenure. Now put them into an environment like the raw cold private sector and you'd see a big difference in attitude and performance. But for every Psaki, there are ten thousand who won't have her options still. They get chewed up and used and discarded like toilet paper in the political staffer machine.
Point to note, I made a conscious decision early on to not work in professional politics. I had no desire to be a bag man or write cheap copy or spin control for a psychopath or put my fate in the hands of a Ted Cruz or a Gavin Newsom or an AOC and the like. The big red flag for you and others here in terms of this current administration in terms of media optics failures is they don't take the easy wins. Because they can't see them. When you have poor talent and you can only draw poor talent, that's the kind of work product you get. The first sign of media optics failure in any administration is a consistent inability to take advantage of the easy wins in front of you. It means your people don't have core fundamentals down. Sometimes people just sit in that church during a wedding ceremony and stare forward and see that young foolish naive couple and say to themselves quietly, "Yeah, long term, this just isn't going to work out. Too bad for them"
I'm going to take a not so wild guess that over all these years, you've hired analysts that just didn't work out. But in order to survive, you've naturally had to have more that did turn out well than otherwise. Your success is derived, in part, from the talent you have working for you, but the talent you draw happens, in part, from your status overall in your industry. Your established success, your future prospects, your record of delivering results and wins or not. This is the core principle under which all organizations rise or fall and it's fundamentally why no one with talent or options is really going to work for the Obama/Biden/Harris/Rice regime.
Well I wouldn't work for them. And that's not because I'm a Conservative ( though some people here have called me a Libertarian) It's because I'm not a masochist.
Sabertooth
Footballguy
How do I submit things to Black Lives Matter? Do they have a P.O. Box or something?GordonGekko said:
GoBirds
Footballguy
I don’t have the address but there have been links posted to her living in one of the richest all white neighborhoods in the country. I’m sure you can find it with the search function.
Summer Wheat
Footballguy
Noted Chef Emeril is a spice man and a Republican. Maybe he should have a sale.
"Democrats are Lazy 50% off spice sale"
Don`t be lazy, get out and get your half off spices.
Probably would not get as much coverage though.
Sleestak
Footballguy
???
I was poking fun at Crawford County PA cuisine (well, my in-laws anyway - a lot of under-spiced deer meat). Not sure why you are quoting me and appending the Emeril stuff. Either my joke flopped, or I am failing to get yours?
Summer Wheat
Footballguy
Did not mean to quote you. And not joking.
Emeril doing a "Dems are Lazy Sale" would be as absurd as Penzey doing his sale.
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I think what I find most interesting is the business strategy angle.
And again, I have no idea if Penzey cares about this at all. But many do.
I've always looked at stuff like this more from a pragmatic business side in being inclusive.
Dolly Parton has the classic answer on why she changed the name of the thing at her business from Dixie Stampede to just the Stampede. https://twitter.com/Football_Guys/status/1373970221439012866?s=20
I don't know Parton personally either, but I'm guessing it wasn't about trying to be woke or playing to one side. It was about not excluding people and customers.
I know business people who are in business for the reason of making money and doing good things with it. BUT they all fully get they have to be profitable as a business if anything is to happen.
And very often, being as inclusive as possible is the right move there.
But I also get there's a "line" with everything.
And again, I have no idea if Penzey cares about this at all. But many do.
I've always looked at stuff like this more from a pragmatic business side in being inclusive.
Dolly Parton has the classic answer on why she changed the name of the thing at her business from Dixie Stampede to just the Stampede. https://twitter.com/Football_Guys/status/1373970221439012866?s=20
I don't know Parton personally either, but I'm guessing it wasn't about trying to be woke or playing to one side. It was about not excluding people and customers.
I know business people who are in business for the reason of making money and doing good things with it. BUT they all fully get they have to be profitable as a business if anything is to happen.
And very often, being as inclusive as possible is the right move there.
But I also get there's a "line" with everything.
fatguyinalittlecoat
Footballguy
Often but not always.
I view it as similar to clothing manufacturers (Abercrombie and Fitch?) that refuse to make XL clothes because they think it will ruin their brand identity
rustycolts
Footballguy
Dolly is a great entertainer and a smart and savvy businesswoman. I think being more inclusive was part of it but Dixie has some very negative connotations associated with it these days. So she probably felt it would be more inclusive just to get rid of the word. I had heard that Winn Dixie had planned on dropping Dixie from their name. Not that it would help them at all.
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Sleestak
Footballguy
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