Word: gimmick
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Zzzzzzzzzra is actually Bill Holland, a 59-year-old painting contractor who uses his telephone name as an advertising gimmick, telling potential customers to look him up in the back of the book in stead of handing out business cards. The listing yields jobs, but it also brings a few zingers: Holland has received crank calls in the middle of the night from as far away as Australia. And his phone bill often totals over $400. "People making illegal calls from phone booths look up the last name in the book and charge them to me," he explains...
Westinghouse and the Equitable Life Assurance Society have introduced an intriguing salary gimmick: they are giving their workers the choice of taking their annual raises in a single lump sum as soon as the increases are granted, rather than having them parceled out in paychecks through the year. Employees like this option because it allows them to use their raises to buy big-ticket items like cars, color TVs and refrigerators sooner rather than later, when they may cost more. But some employers fear that the practice of giving lump-sum raises, if it were to spread, might fan inflation...
...last two weeks Coca-Cola has been mixing Coke-can radios in with their drinks. Sack is one of several students who have unwittingly discovered the new promotional gimmick...
...gimmick is that the animals have moved out of the frat house and into sum mer jobs as waiters in a resort hotel. The hotel is about as festive as Disney World in a hail storm; the characters are so familiar you can turn down the volume and speak their lines yourself. In addition to the two romantic leads (Larry Breeding and Stephanie Faracy), the kids include one fat social retard, one bookish wimp and one wealthy, lock-jawed Wasp. For added measure the writers have stirred in a cook who re-enacts John Belushi's samurai routine...
...pikers they are. Full-page newspaper ads offered depositors something more than "a tacky little toaster" in return for $160,000 left on deposit for eight years -an $84,000 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow II. When the Desert Empire Bank of Cathedral City, Calif., tried the same gimmick in 1977 in return for a $ 1 million six-year deposit, it failed to find even one taker, but East New York claims to have had 30 "serious" inquiries...