Posted on 12/03/2003 10:39:53 AM PST by weegee
Shop workers in Austria are demanding compensation for the "psychological terror" of being subjected to hours of piped Christmas music. A study by trade union leaders found that listening to endless hours of Silent Night and Jingle Bells made shop staff "aggressive and confrontational".
Austrian Trade Union Federation spokesman Gottfried Rieser said: "By the time Christmas comes around there are large scores of abused shop workers who hate the very idea of it. "They cannot bear to listen to Christmas songs and completely lose their temper at the slightest mention of anything to do with Christmas."
Union lawyers had been instructed to see whether legal action can be taken to stop stores constantly playing Christmas jingles, but it appeared there was little they could do. But he added the unions were now calling on employers to voluntarily introduce a code of practice where Christmas music was limited to a few hours a day in peak shopping hours.
Mr Rieser said: "This is psychological terror for shop workers. I know personally of cases where people have suffered psychological problems in the period leading up to Christmas and become aggressive and confrontational." Rieser said Christmas music should only being played between 3pm and 4pm and only in certain departments. He said: "There's no point playing Christmas jingles in a section selling sausages. It should only be played where Christmas presents are for sale."
But Franz Penz, from the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, said the union ideas were not practical as stores could not vary the music in different departments.
Click here, just in case you wear out your parachute pants.....
I'll bet that the increased crowds also irk these salespeople but that wouldn't make a good bargaining point for the Union... "I want you to post someone at the door and only allow 2 customers in the shop at a time!".
Best time to stock up on Christmas CDs is the week after Christmas. Price may be dropped up to 33%. After Christmas, the albums are stored away until next year. I may be buying my CDs a year early but they can always be played next year and I am not buying "dated" recordings that will go out of fashion within a year.
I've got a book on the history of the company (that I got from a library book sale) but I haven't read it.
I don't think that they use subliminal messages in the recordings to get people to buy but there is psychological theory behind the recordings just as there is psychological theory behind painting a dining room's wall's green or the color selected for a waiting room.
Some "anxiety" in the music may be good for keeping shoppers moving (but that can become irritating when a shopper is stuck in a checkout line for over an hour).
Other recordings may be used to make the shoppers sentimental (open the wallet). Then again if one is sentimental for how things were (nostalgia) they may walk away empty handed/with regret seeing nothing but newfangled crap and at today's prices.
I'm listening to Christmas music when I can find one of my tapes or CDs because it just seems so inappropriate to listen to these recordings out of season.
A guy in my "band" just bought a wood job with which to cue a couple of a capella angels singing "Oh Come, O Come Emmanuel". He spends half the play trying to keep the thing warm so that it's in key, which is ironic since the singers are already off in microtoneland by the time they sing "come".
Oh God, it hurts, it hurts...
Slightly off topic, there were all sorts of musicians who worked as studio musicians (Glenn Campbell recorded hundreds of surf songs if I recall and Jimmy Page recorded for many bands before getting his own). Even the jazz band Sun Ra Arkestra recorded a "Batman" record under the "Surf Guitars of Dan and Dale" front name (they are not on the other "Dan and Dale" records).
I know how to fix this. Give them more to do. Then they won't have time to worry about what music is being played. It will just kind of fade into the background.
I have read that Muzak company was originally conceived as a patented way to pipe music through the power lines in a building. This gave them a lock on the business when many buildings did not have lines set aside for music.
It seems likely that most Christmas music played in stores is not official Muzak, but whatever can be put together for the minimum royalty payment. Perhaps the music is successful at getting the large majority of sheeple to buy more at the expense of annoying the rest.
The other day in the grocery store I noticed that they were playing Michael Jackson.
I've got a book on the history of the company (that I got from a library book sale)
I'm a big fan of library book sales. There's a lot of junk but a few gems that you might never have picked up at the original price.
LOL. The Chipmunk music is definitely the worst! Sometimes people I know put it on around Christmas just to see me boil over.
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