Daily Ambivalence - landscaping rocks

The world teams with marketing genius  . . . let me start that again. The world is plagued by marketing genius.

You've seen Smart Water, right? One day a guy filled a plastic bottle with water and called it smart. You'd have to be stupid not to buy it. You know, pay money for free stuff. That falls out of the sky. For free.

I imagine something similar happened with landscaping rocks.

There was a farmer digging up a rock in the middle of his field just as a guy from the city drives by and has a vision of how that rock would look plunked down in the middle of his yard.

City Guy offers to pay the farmer for the rock, and after a brief battle with his conscience, the farmer says he would charge City Guy 50 cents.

Later that day City Guy, back in his car with a rock as copilot, has an epiphany. "Hey," he thinks, "my neighbor is way stupider than me. I'll bet he'd pay fifty bucks for this rock."

And the landscaping rock business was born.

What's his name in the cubicle next to me says this isn't a sign of the Apocalypse, but I don't believe him.