Needless Necessities: Amazon Delivers 100 Million Items Like Masks and Ventilators to the Front Lines, And Lots of Totally Useless Crap to the Rest of Us

Since launching a b-to-b service in late March dedicated to those on the front lines of the coronavirus fight, Amazon says it has provided more than 100 million items to workers, including masks, ventilators, surgical gloves and sanitizers, as CNBC reports. It's not making a profit on those products — yet one more example of a brand doing good during these weird and perilous times. (Ad Age has been keeping an excellent, comprehensive running tally of these companies — check it out here.)

I don't know about you, but I'm doing my own part to make up for Amazon's lost profits and to ensure that business keeps flowing to the world's largest e-tailer and its boss, aka the richest man in the universe. How? By purchasing every little thing off Amazon I've ever even passably considered acquiring for myself.

Acacia cutting board as big as your sofa? Check. That weird David LaChapelle coffee table book from like 20 years ago, full of arty pictures of naked and otherwise compromised celebrities? Check. Scented soy candles? Kiehl's "Rare Earth" man masques? Gardening tools? Protein bars? Mala beads? An Amazon Echo? Yep, I got 'em all, finally stopping myself (for now) before ordering those padded, butt-enhancing drawers they keep serving me ads for on Instagram for some reason.

Apparently, I'm not alone in my quest for grown-up Christmas every day during this quarantine — the mailroom of my apartment building is awash with packages at all times (I swear it looks like the last scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark down there), but never more than over the last few weeks. I've spotted everything there from workout equipment to patio lounge chairs to an espresso machine to an entire living room rug — even the rare bulk pack of paper goods — all ordered up by my fellow oppressed, homebound neighbors, the large share of it from Amazon. And I'm not even counting the dozens of grocery deliveries every week by way of Whole Foods, part of the Amazon family.

A question: Do we really need all this stuff?

The answer, of course, is no. Granted, many of these deliveries contain essentials like food and toilet paper, but I think we could all live quite comfortably without a photography book or patchouli candles (though the prayer beads couldn't hurt right now). Let's face it: Most of this stuff amounts to straight-up, self-pampering, yuppie consumption that, while not exceedingly conspicuous, is nonetheless nonessential.

It reminds me of that Absolutely Fabulous episode in which PR maven Edina Monsoon tells her daughter Saffy that she actually wouldn't mind at all if she chose to lie around all day scarfing snacks and watching TV instead of going off to college: "Frankly, in my business we need that kind of person."

Despite Steven Mnuchin's dire warning that states not lifting their lockdown measures could lead to "permanent economic damage," if my mailroom and the steady volume of UPS, USPS and FexEx trucks up and down my block are any indication, those of us increasingly addicted to home shopping, home delivery and all this totally needless crap are doing our part to keep the red, white and blue wheels of commerce spinning.

Now, might I interest you in a dozen boxes of fast-expiring Pure Protein Peanut Butter Bars?

Be Careful Reporters, You're Running Out of Adjectives

Bleak. Painful. Historic. Uncontrollable. Calamitous.

Yep, we're in a real panic situation.

Or, rather, a PANIC!! situation.

The coronavirus pandemic has been a goldmine for media organizations as they attract more viewers, sell more papers and earn more downloads thanks to a public that's hungry for the latest news about the crisis and its effects — nay, sweeping effects.

It's also been a gift to those writers and editors prone to the hyperbolic and the hysterical.

When they're teaching you to write (as if writing could actually be taught, but that's a topic for another post), you learn to use adjectives judiciously, sparingly. The same goes for adverbs. Stephen King, in his excellent tutorial On Writing, pointed out that "the road to hell is paved with adverbs."

Somebody ought to remind today's reporters of that.

Part of the reason the general public has such contempt for the press is that we have an annoying tendency of describing the news rather than simply reporting it. People do not need to be told that the pandemic and its effects are bleak or painful or unprecedented in our time. And they really don't need to be told that it's calamitous. It's a pandemic. How exactly would a pandemic not be calamitous?

Dear fellow journalists: Please stop trying to impress us with your talents for hyperventilating and your large vocabulary. Just give it to us straight.

'Absolutely NO Burgers!!' Where's the Beef at Wendy's?

With all the marketing throwbacks lately, perhaps it would be fitting for Wendy's to resurrect "Where's the Beef?" That's what one dude suggested on Twitter, sharing a snapshot (above) taken at a Wendy's that had run out of hamburgers — only to have reporters from The New York Times and NBC hit him up for permission to use the photo (which wasn't his, as it turned out, but, rather, was a pic he'd taken from a friend's social media feed). "Some of our menu items may be temporarily limited at some restaurants in the current environment," said Wendy's, which suffered the shortage at the same time it was launching a gift card giveaway on Twitter, as Ad Age reported. What's been lost in much of the coverage of Wendy's running out of meat — and which was absent from even its own corporate statement — is the fact that it is one of the few burger chains to use fresh rather than frozen meat. Seems to me touting the fact that it uses fresh meat would make for a better marketing play than another uninspired contest on social media. Meanwhile, never fear, fast food fans: Word on the street is that McDonald's still has plenty of frozen hockey pucks.