Lightning Round: Pineapple Pizza, Extravagant Purchases & Retail Commercials | Fast Five Shorts

As someone born and raised in Hawaii, where do you come down on pineapple on your pizza?

Thank you for that very important question, Chris.

I try to be measured in my terminology, not go overboard into hyperbole or exaggeration.

So when I say the word abomination, I really mean abomination.

I think you do.

You're pulling punches, Joe.

Many, many things belong on a pizza, but pineapple is absolutely not one of them.

Never know how nothing makes it okay in my book.

I could not agree more with you.

I could not agree more with you.

I think it's an abomination too.

My wife likes it sometimes and I cannot stand it.

Yes, 100% concur.

Yeah, just don't, don't understand it.

I wish they'd picked another name than Hawaiian Pizza.

I feel like it bespurches my whole home state that they call it that question for you.

As we were talking about Home Depot, it got me thinking, just.

I live in a tiny apartment in New York.

My home renovation needs are few and far between.

But Chris, what was your most recent home repair renovation project?

And, and would getting a really fast delivery have helped you out?

Oh man, that's a good question too, Joe.

So my most recent home delivery.

This is going to grow some people out.

My most recent home delivery project was we found bats and squirrels in our attic.

And so we had to call.

We had to call.

We had to call in the Orkin man, Joe, remember those commercials?

We had to ready to call it some serious firepower.

So no three hour delivery or less would not have helped us one bit.

But man, that was, that was not fun.

That was not a fun experience at all.

That does not where the bats eating the squirrels living in harmony.

I don't know who was eating whom, Joe.

That's a good question.

I didn't, I didn't really find that out.

I'm guessing better not to know.

Yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, but there was a lot of bat guada that was told that was found upstairs and like that's not good.

And sounds dreadful and you know, two.

Full day process to get it cleaned out.

Definitely needed bigger guns than, than Home Depot is able to deliver.

All right, given that we called out JC Penney's retail rejuvenation ad campaign, Joe, what is in your opinion the funniest retail ad campaign of all time?

So I'm, I'm going to take this on a little bit of a tangent because as I was thinking about JCPenney, I was doing a little bit of research and I stumbled onto this story about Sears, Sears, the other.

In my mind, like, Sears and JCPenney, like, went together, like for ages and ages.

Back in 1975, Sears still published its fall winter catalogs, right?

Thousands of pages, 1,500ish pages.

July of 1975, this catalog came out, got delivered to 15 million homes around the United States and like, went viral, like way before social media, before there was any way to go viral.

This went viral because on page 602 in the men's selection, there was a photo of two guys in underwear.

And like one of them, there was a sort of a shadow that might have looked like.

Might have looked like you saw a little bit more that you were supposed to see of this guy's anatomy.

And like, it became the thing.

In July of 1975, everybody was talking about the Sears catalog.

And was it or wasn't it like a part of a man's anatomy that you shouldn't see in a family catalog?

There was a novelty song written about it that went to the top of the country music charts.

It was crazy.

This crazy story.

The man on page 602, if you like Google that or like Ask GPT about it, like, this is a real thing.

And it just of strikes me in this, in this era of like social media and people deliberately doing things that are edgy to get the buzz for it, sears totally accidentally, 50 odd years ago, kind of had this moment happen for it.

That was probably frankly the best thing that happened to the Sears catalog in ages.

Everybody in the country was flipping through this catalog, Turning to page 602 to see is it or isn't it?

Oh, my God, I'm gonna have to look this up as soon as I.

Get off the call with you.

Absolutely hilarious bit of retail trivia that like, I feel like it resonates so well with the way that we live our way, way before any sort of modern technology existed.

Wow.

Retail historian Joe Lazlo.

So Sears catalog man, page 602, that's what we all need to search.

Sears catalog 602.

I think.

I think Google will turn up like a lot of coverage from, well, kind of retroactive coverage a lot of people have investigated over the years with like magnifying glasses and like, like, you know, kind of digital scans and zooms to try to figure out it's like the Loch Ness monster of this year's catalog.

Joe, this is usually a family friendly show, but hey, you know, let's, let's get a little risk at the end of the lighting round.

I'll I'll wrap it up and try to take us a little more.

More highbrow maybe.

And, and kind of my last question to you, Chris.

Aside from retail, my other passion is museums.

And so I'm really curious, what's your favorite museum?

I love museums too, Joe.

That's it.

I didn't know that about you.

I, I think I've talked about this on the show, but I have this thing where I take all my kids to the presidential museums throughout the country and I think we've hit four of them, four or five of them thus far.

And I think my favorite museum though of all time, because I don't know why it stands out, is the JFK Museum in Boston.

I just really like that museum.

It's just really interesting and really neat.

What's your favorite museum, Joe, as a museum goer?

So in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a branch called the Cloisters that's way up on the northern tip of Manhattan.

John D. Rockefeller bought a bunch of land up there.

He bought some land across the Hudson river in New Jersey so that it's all like pristine.

And he bought a whole bunch of old monasteries and churches from across France and Spain and other European countries and had them taken apart brick by brick and rebuilt into this purpose built museum at the northern end of Manhattan.

And it's so unlikely to me that you're in New York City and you kind of have this little taste of medieval Europe that's been lovingly created.

It's far enough off the beaten path that it's seldom crowded up there.

They have these beautiful little gardens.

I just, I don't know, there's something about it that's like literally magical to me.

So that, that is my favorite museum in the world.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

That's a great drop, especially for our New York listeners that maybe didn't even know that existed or, you know, people that are going to New York on a vacation too or something, you know.