If you are an Amazon.com customer, you probably already know that they recently added clothing to the mix -- from such stores as Gap, Eddie Bauer, etc. And being a cool, customer focused company, they decided to have a little fun and use their famous "Recommendation Engine" to promote some of the new items they were offering. When I first saw that people who bought a book I was looking for also bought "Clean Underwear," (screenshot, thanks to Mark Hurst) I was taken aback for a moment and then thought, "How clever. These guys have a sense of humor and I like that."
Apparently, not everyone has as finely a honed sense of humor as yours truly. The Wall Street Journal, in an attempt to fill space on what, I guess, must have been a slow news day decided yesterday to write a "tell all" about this little promotion -- as if they were uncovering a malicious business practice on the same scale as Enron's fake energy trading. Hey guys, it's 2002. People understand the Internet enough to "get it." Or, judging from this article (WSJ subscription required), maybe not. Here's one quote that really made me chuckle:
Huston Smith, author of "The World's Religions," which Amazon marketed alongside clean underwear and other items, called the cross-promotions "a perverse act of consumerism ... that pulls the rug out of one of the book's principal messages, which is that man does not live by bread alone."
Mr. Smith, who has taught religion and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Syracuse University and the University of California, Berkeley, added that "I don't like the thought of Amazon using books such as mine to promote what I deem to be overblown consumerism."
Oh, my gosh, Mr. Smith. Get a life.