Automatic gas stations – pull up in your car and stay put in the drivers seat, while the robot-pump takes it from there. What could possibly go wrong?
Was it Bikini Barbershop? Weird show, not much hair cutting. It was a reality show about the owner and the babes in bikinis at this barber shop in New Jersey. The owner was always trying to get the women out of their bikinis and at some point trying to get some woman financing this idea out of her underwear and out of more money. Customers getting haircuts were rarely shown. They probably wouldn’t sign a release. I have no reason to think the women weren’t good barbers but even in bikinis they didn’t appear to have many customers.
Around 1980 a barbershop opened near me with all women barbers. They weren’t wearing bikinis but the place was always busy because they gave good haircuts at a reasonable price. If the Bikini Barbershop couldn’t do that well with half naked women as barbers they had a serious problem. The owner maybe?
The founders of “College Hunks Hauling Junk” tried to start another business called “College Foxes Packing Boxes” and went on Shark Tank to get investors (they didn’t). College Hunks is definitely still in business, but there’s no listings for College Foxes that I can find.
And ISTR a guy on Howard Stern many years ago had a painting business where topless women paint your apartment for only 3x the normal going rate for painters. So it sounds like most/all “scantily or un- clad women perform a mundane service” ideas have already been tried.
Starving Artist Movers is successful based on it’s simple attraction of a lower price because they hire people who desperately need money*.
*I have no idea if they have ever hired any artists, starving or well fed.
Well what do you know.
On the Shark Tank episode, they were definitely pushing that it would be attractive young women doing the work. I have no idea what kind of money-back guarantees they were planning on though.
But having used College Hunks (they were the cheapest! don’t judge me!), they definitely weren’t college students.
I had a thread about my friend that wanted to put a chess-like game on the internet and charge people £1 to compete in tournaments.
I called the thread Killing friends’ dreams
Obviously games do make money, so it is not intrinsically bad in that sense. However the design of his game was awful, and he had no understanding of why pay-to-play won’t get off the ground. Plus he was not a coder, so unsurprisingly, it’s been a money pit for him.
I like the idea, but so I can buy out-of-print books (there technically would never again be out of print books). Amazon does sell print on demand DVDs.
Some streaming services do this. Netflix has some. I think the first one they did was released shortly after Covid. There were points in the movie where you’d use your remote to decide how to branch. I watched it for the novelty of it, but I didn’t find it interesting enough to want to do it again. I can’t even remember the name of the movie or what it was about.
Are you thinking of the Black Mirror episode “Bandersnatch”?
I agree that there’s a market for print-on-demand books, but that doesn’t mean that the print-in-batches model should be abandoned for popular books (which is what this guy was lecturing me about).
The have Bare Buns Housecleaners in my town. I’ve never used them.
Yeah, that’s right. It was “Bandersnatch”. I guess it was released pre-Covid, but I must have watched it during Covid. If interactive shows were something that audiences wanted, I’m sure we’d see a lot more of that content on streaming services since they could easily do it.
I’m a huge fan of Black Mirror. When Bandersnatch first came out, my hardware didn’t support it. A couple of years later I got a new tv and I can watch it now but everyone told me that it was completely underwhelming so I never bothered. My impression is that it was a flop and pretty much killed the idea that anyone would take the time and expense to do another one.
My TV wouldn’t work with it so I had to watch it through a laptop. It was a few years ago so my memory is hazy but I think it was a middling episode, not terrible but not up with the best. It is very meta, because the plot itself involves adapting a book into a computer game using the same ‘choose your adventure’ gimmick.
I remember that thread. There are similar categories of great software ideas such as “I have to raise the money to hire a development team. Do you know anybody who would invest in this?”, “Can you write this software for me? I can’t pay you but I’ll cut you in on the profits”, and “I’m going to learn to code online and do it all myself”. Now that I’m retired I encounter this less often. That’s another benefit of retirement.
I don’t think this idea is obviously stupid, though. I’ve seen steakhouse chains sell barbecue groceries (steaks, sides, condiments…) under their brand. Not readymade TV dinners, but still something where they can’t control the outcome. I’m sure there is a reason why McDonald’s hasn’t started its branded TV dinners, and it might well fail if tried, but I don’t think the idea is blatantly, obviously dumb.
Netflix also has “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs the Reverend” (which was kind of fun), but I don’t know if there have been any interactive shows since then.
One of my customers that we’ve fabricated equipment for does just this line of business.