Word: widgets
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...then Santa sold out. More specifically, he sold the rights to his name and his holiday to a multinational business seeking to diversify. Amalgamated Widget Corporation got Santa's franchise for a song, because old Claus had no idea that his hobby was of any value, and besides, his doctors had been urging him for years to retire for his health. His job gave him ulcers. So Santa left Christmas behind to spend his last years breeding mutant strains of reindeer for high-speed sleigh competition, and Amalgamated Widget became The Santa Corporation...
Then the hype was on. One day a year of Christmas was not enough for the growth-minded executives in the upper echelons of The Santa Corporation. As Amalgamated Widget, they had used the company's formidable promotional muscle to expand July Fourth Weekend into July Fourth Week in order to boost the firm's Patriotism and Pyrotechnics Division. As The Santa Corporation, they now began taking out five-minute television spots and full-age ads in major daily newspapers to, as their ad men put it, "make that Christmas spirit last and last and last...
...monotony surrounding production-line work have been of considerable concern in U.S. industry. One alternative often cited by various work reformers is the team-assembly concept pioneered by the Swedish automakers Saab and Volvo, according to which workers in small groups perform rotating tasks rather than installing the same widget on a fast-moving, impersonal line. American sociologists and union and management officials regularly return from tours of such plants favorably impressed. But recently a group of six Detroit engine-plant employees tried the Swedish way by working at a Swedish auto company. Their conclusion: even Scandinavian-style factory work...
...inflation costs more than it is worth. For the homeowner, a rise in the value of his house is purely theoretical profit until he sells, but the land spiral meanwhile helps raise the price of almost everything that he must buy. Packing plants, bakeries, supermarkets, movie theaters, filling stations, widget makers -all pass on to their customers the rising prices-and taxes-that their owners must pay for the land on which they set up shop...
...approach to sex is sidelong-frank, half-innocent curiosity mixed with a twinkling suspicion that the whole durn thing might be some kind of a trick. To help Garner feel at home off the range, Remick comes on as a clotheshorse. Though her head is supposedly full of Universal Widget, she wears Norman Norell originals and talks ersatz girl-talk with a plain little roommate in a plush little flat that looks as though Doris Day had just moved out of it. Everything is untouched...