Saturday, January 2, 2016

Someone Will Love This Ugly Piece Of Furniture

Since it was too cold and windy yesterday up on the mountain to ski, I made a quick trip into a furniture store in town since I'll soon be in the market for new furniture.  After wandering the main level of couches, beds, and dinner tables, I worked my way upstairs to what appeared to be the floor for less desirable furniture like Laz-E-Boy chairs and some ugly stuff priced at a discount.

Nothing upstairs caught my eye until I landed on these incredibly ugly specimens:



I couldn't believe my eyes.  It was a three piece Duck Commander (A&E's Duck Dynasty show) living room set.  

For those of you who have been living under a rock with the guy on the Geico commercial, Duck Dynasty is a show about this wealthy family of bearded men in Louisiana that runs a duck hunting supply company and does all kinds of silly things at work and in their home life.  The patriarch has also become a much sought after speaker in conservative circles for his ability to rattle off such zingers like this:
The man best known as the Duck Commander was briefly suspended by A&E in 2013 after he made anti-gay comments in a GQ interview.  “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” Robertson told GQ.


I actually watched an episode once and found it to be incredibly boring.  Granted, I prefer watching documentaries or reading history books, so I'm probably not the targeted audience.  But still, the episode I watched was basically a bunch of bearded guys screwing around at work while the son who ran the company tried to get the guys back to work. Then they went home to their beautiful homes and beautiful wives.  And the oldest brother rented a luxury RV to go hunting which upset a younger brother, which looked like a staged reality TV scene to create drama and conflict to be resolved at the end of the show.  You know, real reality!  

Even though I didn't find the show appealing and I don't really agree with the old man's political beliefs, I admire how this family is capitalizing on their 15 minutes of fame, which is approaching a decade and appears to have long-term staying power.  These guys went from having frosted tip hair to having full ZZ Top style beards, taking their supply company to the airwaves, capitalizing on the explosion of cable TV and America's demand for "reality" television, which networks love because they're so cheap to produce until the stars get famous and can command more money.  

The business acumen and ubiquity of the Duck Dynasty guys is really impressive.  They've been quite the sensation for nearly a decade and are now part of American pop culture, with numerous branding and merchandise deals that Forbes Magazine estimated was as high as $400 million

It shouldn't have been a surprise to me that they now have a branded furniture line.  Someone here in Bend is going to see that three piece living room set and realize that it's the perfect finishing touches to their "man cave".  And in the end, the Duck guys will get to cash another check for another camouflage branded merchandising product that they sold.  Good for them - only in America!  

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