Word: gimmick
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...spur personal investment by distributing savings chests to Japanese households. The local saleswoman held the keys to savers' chests. Each month she came by to empty the chest and place the money in the customer's Nomura account. The company gave out more than 1 million chests before the gimmick was retired...
...cold-shouldered by his best friend; and her mother Polly gives up her free-lance photography business. On the up side, her father Ivan becomes friends with a terminally ill homosexual who is manning an AIDS hotline. Amanda's status as a potential gymnastic champion is more than a gimmick; it provides a standard by which her physical deterioration and emotional growth are measured. The little tumbler is a reminder that when A.E. Housman wrote "To an Athlete Dying Young," he did not mean this young. At Risk is a one-hankie book and could be a two-hankie movie...
...real boomlet, perhaps because he tried too hard to create one by flogging polls showing he could carry Florida. His record of ordering more executions during his eight-year term than any other sitting Governor could offset Dukakis' soft-on-crime image. He is a master of the political gimmick -- he performed 100 different jobs in 100 days during his 1978 gubernatorial campaign -- with potent Washington connections (he is the brother-in-law of Washington Post Board Chairman Katharine Graham). But with less than two years in the Senate, he brings little Washington or foreign policy experience to the ticket...
Hollywood loves a gimmick -- and too often loves it to death. One year there are three movies about gallant farm women battling fate and fortune; the next it's comic-book heroes saving the world or muscle-bound hulks trying to write a different ending to the war in Viet Nam. This year's flavor is a gentle fantasy about body switching: the young and old changing places with supposedly comic results. But 18 Again!, Vice Versa and Like Father, Like Son were more frantic than comic, and it remains for Big, the last out of the gate, to show...
...offer: a free flight from the U.S. to West Germany. The catch: you have to buy a Mercedes-Benz. For the first time in its history, Daimler-Benz is resorting to an American-style gimmick to sell its luxury cars in the U.S. Because of the falling value of the dollar, the starting price in the U.S. for the smallest Mercedes, the 190 E 2.3, has risen by 32% over the past three years, to $29,000. As a result, U.S. sales have stalled, and the company has had to abandon its traditional take-it-or-leave-it attitude. Customers...