mellicious | Entries tagged with advertising

Huh, well, apparently the Galveston (County) Buc-ee's that's currently under construction is not going to be the biggest one ever. Darn. Well, we just went in the brand-new Waller location this afternoon, and I think a little smaller might actually be better. It was a LONG way (from the side door where we came in) to the restrooms. I assume that this newer one is not going to actually be small by any stretch of the imagination, so I'm sure it'll be plenty big to suit me.

Buc-ee's is a thing in Texas. I wasn't sure, but looking at their website, apparently they are still confined to Texas. They started out as just normal convenience stores that were maybe a little on the large side. They were in mostly rural areas around here - the first one I ever remember seeing was at Highway 646 and Highway 3, which is in League City nowadays, and maybe it always was, technically, but 20 years ago was totally the middle of nowhere. I'm not sure if that Buc-ees is still there - I guess it is. I also remember seeing one down around Brazosport, which actually could have been the original one, or one of the original ones, because apparently they started in Lake Jackson, and that's another one of those areas where the city limits are amorphous - Lake Jackson/Freeport, which is down across San Luis Pass, just south of Galveston. (Big Bang Theory fans may know that that's where Sheldon is said to be from.)

Anyway, we went in the Cypress location yesterday - which is smallish, by Buc-ee's standards - and got fudge, because I've had it before and knew it was really good. (Buy 4 chunks, get 2 free - the chunks are about a quarter pound, I was told, and they're 3.50, so you end up with a pound and a half for $14 and change, which is not cheap, but heck, it was Christmas Eve.) I also got gas - I've already forgotten how much the gas was, exactly, but it was pretty reasonable. Then we got about 15 or 20 miles down the road and found the new one in Waller, that they have built since we last came through there last year. We didn't stop there yesterday, but today on the way back, it happened to fall about right coming home from Bryan, since I'd had a lot of tea at lunch, and after about an hour of driving, I was absolutely ready for a bathroom break. So we took care of that at the giant Waller store, and I bought more tea to go in my refillable mug that I bought yesterday (I think it was $3.99, if you want to know, and refills are 99 cents), and Rob got a Coke, and we poked around the t-shirts and such a bit on the way out, too. Want a Duck Commander shirt? Buc-ee's has lots.

(I don't even know what Duck Commander is. I assume it's different from Duck Dynasty, right?)

(Written yesterday.)

Remember when I was talking about Buc-ee's? I went to Galveston for a doctor appointment this morning, and on the way back I spotted a new billboard on the freeway - for the Buc-ee's in Madisonville, 138 miles away. It said so on the sign. It didn't say Madisonville, I just happen to know that's where it is. It's sort of hard for me to believe that it's really cost effective to put up a billboard that far away from the destination they're advertising. Do that many people really leave Galveston and drive straight through Houston to Dallas? (which is some 250 miles, so the Buc-ee's is more or less halfway.) I think of most Galveston tourists as being from the Houston area but I know some do come further. (I didn't bring a camera so I don't have photographic evidence for the billboard, but it looked essentially like the one I posted before, anyway.)

I hadn't been to Galveston in a couple of months - there are still pockets of destruction visible but things are back to some semblance of normal, at least, and the tourists are back in force. It's that time of year, though - as a former tourist industry worker, I would say the peak tourist season in Galveston is about July 1st to mid-August. The minute the kids go back to school, it's over. Wanna visit Galveston with the warm weather but without the crowds? Do it after school starts.

The doctor's visit was mostly about prescription refills, so nothing much interesting to report there. Oh, except that I learned that my doctor lives in one of the few areas of Galveston which did not flood, lucky woman. I hadn't seen her in a year, so we had to catch up on the (massive) changes in all of our lives since then. Things at UTMB are edging back towards normal a bit, too. The office was busier than the last time I went, for sure, and the clinics in general were, too, but still nothing like it used to be. I hear the ER is about to re-open, though, so that will push things back towards normalcy some more. (If you're not entirely getting the connection, it's because the ER is a big driver of admissions and clinic visits and all that stuff. So "getting back to normal" as far as volume of business at UTMB can't really happen at all without it.)

I put pictures up on Flickr - they're the bulk of this set. As I said, I've been to the Alamo many times before but I don't know that I've ever taken pictures before. (Although there may well be some in my mom's pictures.)

There is one of these billboards every mile or two all the way from the edge of Houston to, um, wherever this Buc-ee's is - Luling, maybe. Wherever it is, it's 106 miles from Katy, where the signs start. I think every one of them are different, and I kept saying we ought to make a list of the funniest ones, but we never did. I know that one about 35 or 40 miles away said, "YOU CAN HOLD IT" - and one said something to the effect of "YOUR THRONE AWAITS." They do have really nice restrooms, I'll give them that. (We didn't stop there on the way but we did on the way back.) Oh, and one coming out of San Antonio said, "TWO WORDS: CHOCOLATE FUDGE" - and sure enough, we came out of there with fudge. It was awfully good, too - although admittedly fudge is a pretty hard thing not to do well. (I wonder if they actually had beaver nuggets. I didn't think to check.)

( More pictures )

You can never tell if these things are going to work until you actually post them, so here goes. (It's supposed to link to Super Bowl ads. We'll see!)

My Wal-Mart circular for the week has what appears to be a whole four-page insert of Pirates of the Caribbean merchandise.

Dervish dance
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

You know I can only go so long without a GuildWars picture. This is Sharzad the Dervish, doing the whirling thing in her very, very expensive new armor. (I know it looks like a party dress, but it's armor, ok? That's just the Way of Guild Wars.) I gather that columbina was not terribly impressed by Sharzad's armor, after all the talk about it - it had its own thread on the guild forum, no less - but I love it and I'm the one who has to look at it all the time, so that's what matters, right? I guess it's all that detail on the skirt that appeals to me so much.

We went to see Letters from Iwo Jima yesterday (which was really, really good, by the way), and we missed the first quarter of the Super Bowl because of that. I don't usually get all that excited about football these days, and even the commercials have been pretty lame the last couple of years, but I have to admit that what I saw of it this year was fairly entertaining. The game was close enough to be in doubt until pretty close to the end, and at least some of the commercials were funny - even the Kevin Federline one, much to my surprise. (Some of the other much-ballyhooed ones were pretty lame. Go Daddy - yuck. Career Builder's "office jungle" stuff was off-putting. And the men licking the HHR was just plain weird.) Oh, I also liked "connectile dysfunction" - was that Sprint? - they hit just the right straight-faced tone with it, I thought.

(No mom news to speak of. She's just the same.)

I'm not actually putting a link in this post, because I'm not at all sure I want to reward these people for this, but it's something I've never seen before so I have to comment on it:

View Millions of Jobs
WorkTree.com

The above was stamped in red ink onto a $5 bill I got this morning. Obviously it got my attention. Of course I imagine it's also quite illegal. Isn't there a law about defacing bills? I think there is, anyway.

But still, it's a new form of advertising - in my experience, anyway - and that makes it interesting.

I can't sleep, so I will tell you that on the freeway driving to Mom's the other day, I noticed that there were two signs that said "Your wife called. She said it's ok." One was a motorcycle dealership, the other one was a strip club. Somehow I think having more than one of those lessens the impact. Then again, I'm not the target audience for either of those. I wonder if there's anybody out there who came home on a motorcycle having had a lap dance because those signs caused him to feel free to - somehow I kinda doubt it. But you never know.

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Entries tagged with advertising

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