Calendars
Have you been to the stores recently, those stores that were/are stocked with dozens and dozens of calendars and are now frantically discounting them in the fear that what inventory remains will remain unsold, unusable and have to be discarded? I know all about that, having once produced my own set of calendars, mine being a series of questions to ponder, thoughts I still go through such as would I voluntarily leave this place if I knew that I would never come back (my original question was that of leaving earth). In my case, the publication of such a thing involved many trips to both my graphic artist and my printer, choosing the right size and color and the weight of the paper stock and the right fonts and "look and feel" of it and on and on (all that after going through constant re-writes and editing). And once completed, there came the time and cost of mailing them out to stores and vendors and different media contacts in the hope that someone would look at it and say "this is terrific" and launch it onto the shelves of millions of stores and it would prove to be a bestseller. Hmmm, did I mention that I did all of this when I was quite young (early 20s), ready to conquer the world, rather naive, and rather broke? And here was the life lesson learned...calendars are tough sells. Mine bombed, a loss-leader as the term is politely coined by vendors (I would more appropriately just call it as it was, a total loss at least financially). Other than a few responses from a few celebrities (back then, I was thrilled that old-time actor Fred MacMurray would take the time to thank me with a hand-written letter) my pile of praise was mostly a rather large collection of rejection notes...and invoices due. Gulp...pay the printer, pay the graphic artist, pay the piper.
Today the world of calendars has vastly changed, the graphics and layouts rather impressive and often a pleasure to open. Even the freebies that charities dash out are fairly well-done (but making me wonder exactly why they would send me a calendar instead of helping animals or wherever their cause was supposed to be). But within many of those calendars there sits a wealth of information, the result of a cadre of editors and writers and photographers putting together what they felt was a calendar that had something to say. In just one of the calendars I purchased (this particular one from Audubon) came the tiny print describing each month's photograph. Some excerpts: On robins -- Most robins are present year-round; they're just not very visible. In cold seasons, they retreat from the places they're commonly seen --on the ground, often tugging at earthworms-- to nearby woods, where they feed on available fruits and berries and come together en masse. Wintertime flocks can contain upward of a quarter-million birds. On Spanish moss -- ...neither Spanish nor moss. An emblematic plant of the Deep South, it is a native bromeliad belonging to the same family as pineapple...it is an epiphyte, not a parasite, and does no harm to its hosts, securing all its nutrients and water from the air. On the Atlantic's laughing gulls (one of 22 species of "sea" gulls) -- The gulls, named for their laughter-like calls, are year-round residents. Once threatened by the devastating nineteenth-century feather trade, the species rebounded in the twentieth century.
Yet even with all of those dug-out pieces of information and the taking and sorting of thousands of photos, the calendars are many. Sunsets, vintage travel posters, cute animated paintings, place to see in a country, horses, kittens, dead celebrities, almost ad nauseum. But come the first week of the new year, I've noticed that even the expensive calendars begin dropping in price and often to less that $5.00 (some as low as $2), a figure which almost certainly doesn't cover the design, printing, shipping, stocking and other costs of making the darn things. But then if you're a store or a vendor $5.00 is five times more than zero dollars, and multiply that by several thousand (or perhaps hundreds of thousands) and you can see where this might be headed. Thus places such as Liquidation.com and Bulq.com (among others) appear, places meant to "clear out" those leftovers and surplus and returned items...except maybe calendars. By next month, the window to sell them will be over and the majority will be headed to the shredder or the landfill or hopefully, the recycler (don't panic, this happens weekly and monthly to virtually all publishers, from books to magazines). Perhaps calendar sales have dropped because there simply are so many choices; or maybe we consumers simply don't want to be reminded of what day it is anymore, or at least not to be reminded in each and every room and place on the wall. Perhaps our phones or tablets tell us enough, dinging us with appointment reminders and getting us to remember that today is Thursday or Sunday or no day. As the old Forest Gump joke went, his naming of two days that began with "T" was simply "today" and "tomorrow." Maybe it really is just that simple.
But forget all that for a moment. Imagine the amount of waste in general, everything from outdated clothes (think winter and spring is suddenly around the corner) to food. Komal Ahmad thought of exactly those things while a senior at Cal Berkeley; why was so much food being discarded from her campus while across the street she saw homeless people digging through cans to find a scrap or two of food. Couldn't kitchens and restaurants be linked with drivers willing to get the excess food to community distribution centers. The result was her rounding up a team of software engineers to create an app that provides that connection, bringing drivers (from vets to those formerly homeless) together with businesses wanting to donate their usable food. So far, nearly 700,000 people have been fed on what would have been 830,000 pounds of tossed-out food (a promising beginning but a drop in the bucket of the estimated 133 billion pounds of food tossed out annually in the U.S.). As CEO of Copia,* Ahmad saw the need and began working to make a difference. But calendars...as the site Calendar Revolution asked, "what is time?" For Komal Ahmad, it may have boiled down to just that question, that we have to eat but for many there really is only "today" and "tomorrow."
*I've provided a link to the original piece in Fast Company but not to the company itself since their link shows up as "untested" among security sites...you can venture there if you wish by going to: https://gocopia.com/#/
Today the world of calendars has vastly changed, the graphics and layouts rather impressive and often a pleasure to open. Even the freebies that charities dash out are fairly well-done (but making me wonder exactly why they would send me a calendar instead of helping animals or wherever their cause was supposed to be). But within many of those calendars there sits a wealth of information, the result of a cadre of editors and writers and photographers putting together what they felt was a calendar that had something to say. In just one of the calendars I purchased (this particular one from Audubon) came the tiny print describing each month's photograph. Some excerpts: On robins -- Most robins are present year-round; they're just not very visible. In cold seasons, they retreat from the places they're commonly seen --on the ground, often tugging at earthworms-- to nearby woods, where they feed on available fruits and berries and come together en masse. Wintertime flocks can contain upward of a quarter-million birds. On Spanish moss -- ...neither Spanish nor moss. An emblematic plant of the Deep South, it is a native bromeliad belonging to the same family as pineapple...it is an epiphyte, not a parasite, and does no harm to its hosts, securing all its nutrients and water from the air. On the Atlantic's laughing gulls (one of 22 species of "sea" gulls) -- The gulls, named for their laughter-like calls, are year-round residents. Once threatened by the devastating nineteenth-century feather trade, the species rebounded in the twentieth century.
Yet even with all of those dug-out pieces of information and the taking and sorting of thousands of photos, the calendars are many. Sunsets, vintage travel posters, cute animated paintings, place to see in a country, horses, kittens, dead celebrities, almost ad nauseum. But come the first week of the new year, I've noticed that even the expensive calendars begin dropping in price and often to less that $5.00 (some as low as $2), a figure which almost certainly doesn't cover the design, printing, shipping, stocking and other costs of making the darn things. But then if you're a store or a vendor $5.00 is five times more than zero dollars, and multiply that by several thousand (or perhaps hundreds of thousands) and you can see where this might be headed. Thus places such as Liquidation.com and Bulq.com (among others) appear, places meant to "clear out" those leftovers and surplus and returned items...except maybe calendars. By next month, the window to sell them will be over and the majority will be headed to the shredder or the landfill or hopefully, the recycler (don't panic, this happens weekly and monthly to virtually all publishers, from books to magazines). Perhaps calendar sales have dropped because there simply are so many choices; or maybe we consumers simply don't want to be reminded of what day it is anymore, or at least not to be reminded in each and every room and place on the wall. Perhaps our phones or tablets tell us enough, dinging us with appointment reminders and getting us to remember that today is Thursday or Sunday or no day. As the old Forest Gump joke went, his naming of two days that began with "T" was simply "today" and "tomorrow." Maybe it really is just that simple.
But forget all that for a moment. Imagine the amount of waste in general, everything from outdated clothes (think winter and spring is suddenly around the corner) to food. Komal Ahmad thought of exactly those things while a senior at Cal Berkeley; why was so much food being discarded from her campus while across the street she saw homeless people digging through cans to find a scrap or two of food. Couldn't kitchens and restaurants be linked with drivers willing to get the excess food to community distribution centers. The result was her rounding up a team of software engineers to create an app that provides that connection, bringing drivers (from vets to those formerly homeless) together with businesses wanting to donate their usable food. So far, nearly 700,000 people have been fed on what would have been 830,000 pounds of tossed-out food (a promising beginning but a drop in the bucket of the estimated 133 billion pounds of food tossed out annually in the U.S.). As CEO of Copia,* Ahmad saw the need and began working to make a difference. But calendars...as the site Calendar Revolution asked, "what is time?" For Komal Ahmad, it may have boiled down to just that question, that we have to eat but for many there really is only "today" and "tomorrow."
*I've provided a link to the original piece in Fast Company but not to the company itself since their link shows up as "untested" among security sites...you can venture there if you wish by going to: https://gocopia.com/#/
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