Tuesday, 12 July 2016

Prime Day Comes But Once A Year

Woo! Yay! Houpla! Happy Amazon Prime Day, everyone!!1! I know you’ve all been looking forward to this moment for months, I can tell because of all the e-mails we received begging for the traditional KiaSA Primevent Calendar counting down the milliseconds until those hot, hot deals are available, but we’ve taken an executive decision to take a step back. You see, some of you youngsters might not believe this, but we remember a time before Prime Day. Yes, as terrible as that is to contemplate, back in the 1970s it just didn’t exist. Children didn’t know the excitement of waking up on Prime Day Morning and rushing to check their e-mail to find a message from Saint Primus claiming he’d tried to deliver some presents but nobody was in, even though you’d been staring out of the front window the whole day looking for a delivery van. I remember that very first Prime Day like it was only a year ago; father returning from the costermonger with a basket of internets (they were still on ration then), loading the cards into the Sinclair ZX Analytical Engine (with the odd rubber punch-keys), the whole family clustering around the flickering images of the electromechanical Baird device… what treats might there be? Great Scott, a pair of spats for but one and nine instead of half a crown! A perfectly air-tight manhole cover (with flange) for fourteen shillings? Why, usually they were a guinea apiece! On and on came the parade of delights; household linens, ironmongery, seed drills, radiostereograms, ne’er had we been so excited.

It’s all so different these days, of course. Streaming doo-dads on your virtual thingumypad while hoverboarding to the lunar shuttle, who has time to really appreciate a chrome interociter with deluxe bead condenser for a mere 276 galactic credits? That’s why it’s time to reassess your priorities. Forget about getting together with friends and family, forget about deep personal contemplation, forget about the Doctor Who Prime Day Special (oh all right, maybe don’t completely forget about it, The Daleks Buy Some Very Reasonable Colouring Pencils sounds like it’s going to be a corker), let’s get back to the *true* meaning of the day: buying consumer goods you don’t really need because they seem like a bargain.

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