Zolton's Facebook Pranks on Mall Electronics Companies

April 1, 2013

Zolton’s Facebook Pranks on Mall Electronics Companies

I originally wrote this piece for MediaShower.com, for use on the late, great comedy site ZuG.com. Text and images published here with permission.

Visigoths. FD&C Red Number 2. Melanie Griffith’s acting career.

What do these things have in common — besides having awful reputations, being scary as hell and capable of killing you in multiple ways?

They’re all extinct. Dead as dinosaurs, dodo birds and dot-matrix printers.

There’s no shame in dying out, of course; it happens to all of us eventually. Plants, animals, hairstyles, people — even whole companies, snuffed out in the prime of their supply chain management cycle.

(Or more likely, somewhat past their prime. I’m just saying.)

One sector at high risk for this sort of corporate genocide is the kind of electronics company you find in shopping malls. Long the haven of those desperate for Walkman-sized batteries or the latest BetaMax blockbuster, time — and Amazon, and CostCo, and Newegg, and a thousand others — have finally passed these brick-and-mortar Cinnabon neighbors by.

Nearly gone but not forgotten, today I’m paying homage to these former FM antenna and phone adapter giants. In their honor, I visited some of the biggest names in suburban mall electronics.

I mean, not in person, of course. I’m not driving all the way out there for an Orange Julius and a three hundred percent markup. What is this, the nineties?

Instead, of course, I checked them out on Facebook. Read on for my tributes — and my actual posts on the companies’ Facebook walls. It’s the next-best thing to an off-brand boom box and a new NES controller. Ah, those were the days.