• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, July 8, 2011

Two unusual stories caught our fancy on this lethargically steamy July morn: Miguel Bustillo's "Today's Special at Wal-Mart: Something Weird" in the Wall Street Journal and Rhymer Rigby's piece in Financial Times titled "How To Handle Difficult Customer Requests."

The subhed to Bustillo's piece reads: "With Many Stores, Lots Happens; Pranks, Dancing, 'Norman' Behind the Coke Rack." We don't want to give it all away because The Rupe needs every click-through he can muster this morning (see below), but consider the "unauthorized, sexually suggestive music video paean to picking up women in the aisles of a Walmart," shot by one Mr. Ghetto.

"'The same women that are going to be at the club are going to be at Walmart,' Mr. Ghetto, a/k/a Robert Mayes, says of his video, which has been viewed more than three million times on YouTube. 'Only at Walmart, you don't have to spend $20 on drinks to talk to them.'"

(The video was pulled from YouTube after protests, and then reportedly restored after counter-protests, as Ad Age's Jack Neff reported in May. In any event, it lives on embedded in his story, if you really need to see it.)

But that's not all, as they say. "Almost any imaginable aspect of American life can and does take place inside Walmart stores, from births to marriages to deaths," Bustillo points out and illustrates with tales such as the massive resident rodent known as "Norman the Nutria" to shoppers in Abbeville, La., and a 5-foot 2-inch mom named Monique Lawless stomping on the hood of a car containing three brothers whom she saw allegedly shoplifting beer.

Is that on YouTube? You betcha.

Rigby, on the other hand, reports on Virgin Atlantic's compilation of passenger's "more outré in-flight requests." Doesn't seem so outrageous to me to request that the pilot of a plane fly a bit slower so that you can get a full eight hours sleep, but standards on what constitutes outré obviously vary.

The larger lesson of the story is that as crazy as some requests might seem, the wise company learns to deal with them. Although "difficult requests are best dealt with by expert staff who can think beyond standard operating procedures, technology is also making inroads in this area."

We'll let you read about the technology at FT and jump back to the opportunities presented when a human asks the seemingly impossible of another human: "Let the person know it's a challenge but say that you like challenges and ask for a bit of time," Philip Graves, author of Consumer.ology, tells Rigby. "Bring a psychological element into it and sow the seeds of a good story -- humans are essentially just story-telling primates."

If this has not been enough weirdness for you, you can get a regular dose of it with "Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird" newspaper column or at WeirdUniverse.net, which is definitely the sort of website you want to keep your good corporate name out of.

Yesterday's entry featuring a fiasco at a Chase Bank -- man gets arrested for attempting to cash a legitimate cashier's check issued to him by the very branch where he was apprehended. Man loses car, job, etc. Then there's the classic ad copy from a National Rifle Association marketing piece in 1962: "Tipper Flintlock says ... "Never point your gun at one you've befriended/For if it goes off -- your friendship is ended."

FOLLOW UP: While we're on the subject of story-telling primates, the solution of The Rupe's son and heir-apparent to the cascading scandal at his top-selling weekly tabloid ("Ford Backs Off 'News Of The World' After Hacking") was very Murdochian: Take away the football and go home. His announcement yesterday that he was calling it quits at the newspaper was met with much cynicism. But, from a business standpoint, what choice had News Corp.'s News International?

"'This is clearly a commercial decision in part to jettison a tainted and toxic brand because advertisers are fleeing in droves, and also we as MPs are being inundated with emails and calls from constituents asking us to stand up to News International,' said Labor MP Paul Farrelly, who led a parliamentary inquiry into the first wave of allegations involving the hacking of celebrities, royals and politicians," David Folkenflik reports on NPR.

Murdoch also says he will give all advertising revenues from the final edition to charitable organizations. 

In one fell swoop of the axe, the Murdochs ruined our observation that the only bright side to the imbroglio might be "all the reporters gainfully employed in covering the scandal and its aftermath." But in one last tabloidly cliché, the intoxicants flowed freely and free for the cashiered journos at a local pub.