Instant Gratification
A group of us Realtors were gathered for a little session, talking about the change in the Real Estate market. Someone had complained that because their Listings are taking longer to sell now, they have to keep refreshing and expanding their advertising.
“You guys don’t even know how lucky you are,” I said, sounding like the old man in the room. “You’re spoiled by all your fancy gadgets and gizmos.”
Gadgets and gizmos? I must be channeling my Granddad. I don’t think those words exist in modern language.
I went on: “You guys can pump out advertising to thousands and millions of people with a few flicks of your fingers on your keyboard! Online streaming services, worldwide, are at your command! A beautiful color flyer for your Listing can be created in seconds and sent to the demographic of your choice. Where they are sent, when, how many, and for how long, is your choice, the master of your own Advertising Agency and Broadcasting Company!” I said, “If we had these things in my day, we would think we had died and gone to heaven!” There’s old Grandad coming through again. I think “died and gone to heaven” might not exist in modern language, and maybe not “Advertising Agency and Broadcasting Company.” Despite the eye-rolling I think I detected here and there in the room, I carried on. “And here’s the capper. It doesn’t cost you anything! It’s free! It’s instant gratification!” I said.
“Instant gratification! In my day, we had to spend a bunch of money advertising our Listings in the newspaper and magazines,” I said. “Advertising was print-only. No Internet. No Social Media. We took ‘pictures’ of property with our ‘cameras’ (I did the quotation marks with my hands in the air, wiggling two fingers on each) and had them ‘developed’ at the ‘Photo Shop.’
“We had to wait for those photos,” I went on, “for days. No instant gratification! Then we went to the ‘Printer’, not the machine in the office, black and white only, but the brick-and-mortar store, where a ‘clerk’ helped us design a Color flyer. Again, we waited for days. And we paid! Paid big-time! And we went all over town to get these things done!”
“Did you walk for miles and miles in the sleet and snow, barefoot?” asked one of us, bent on sarcasm. Laughter rang throughout the room.
Ha! They caught my Grandad voice and busted me.
Old granddad was right, though, dang it! But, of course, back in the day, we youngsters rolled our eyes when Grandad got on his high horse (does “high horse” still exist in our language?).
When Granddad said “You kids are spoiled by all your gadgets and gizmos,” he was referring to transistor radios and color TVs. When remote controls for our TVs came in vogue, he just about flipped his lid. “Now I’ve seen it all,” he said. “We are officially doomed. These kids won’t even get up from the couch!”
Oh, if old granddad could see us now. Instant gratification is part of normal life. For instance, over the holidays our daughter was visiting from her home in New Mexico, along with my sister and brotherin-law from the Bay, and we were talking about how online orders can arrive almost instantly.
My daughter said that even in her area, away from big cities, an Amazon driver wheeled up to her place with her order within 24 hours of her tapping the “Order Now” button on a website. “Instant gratification!” I said. “Back in my day, when I ordered from the ads in the back of a ‘comic book’, like a miniature slingshot, or X-ray glasses, or a plastic submarine, I had to ‘write a letter’ with my $1.00 enclosed, and wait, checking the mailbox for weeks. When the package arrived, the long wait it a was big deal. No instant gratification there.”
Did I detect an eye-roll?