The UK's Shops Act made it illegal to operate a shop on Sunday... unless one was Jewish (since the Jewish observed the sabbath on Saturday). So business owner Mike Robertson figured that to open his stores on Sunday he simply had to make his staff convert to Judaism.
The Shops Act had other oddities. According to the
London Telegraph, a shop could stay open if it was "in an officially designated 'holiday resort area'" or if it restricted sales to "certain kinds of perishable goods, like fruit, flowers and vegetables; medical and surgical appliances, newspapers, cigarettes and refreshments."
Bristol Western Daily Press - Mar 8, 1977
When you want to bring your dog to the office, he or she must be properly dressed in a business-like manner.
Patent here.
That endless red-carpet SFX is pretty impressive for the 1960s. Plus, an eight-track player!
Darryl Gammill came up with a way to convert stock-price movements into music. The result was the release in 1985 of "Rhapsody in Big Blue," which was a musical rendition of IBM's stock activity between April 1984 to April 1985.
I haven't been able to find any samples of the album online. I can't even find any used copies of it for sale. This was evidently an extremely obscure record release.
Popular Computing Weekly - April 3-9, 1987
Time - Sep 16, 1985
The Economist - Aug 31, 1985
For only $3 a night, Colin White would rent out one of the drunks from his pub to liven up a party.
White explains that when people are worried about their parties getting off to a slow start, they call up and say: "Oh, Mr. White, I wonder whether you could send us around a drunk about 8:30 p.m.?"
So his employees could legitimately claim to be professional drunks.
Asbury Park Press - Nov 26, 1971
These hair rental ads ran for about five years in British papers. So I assume the company must have done decent business.
I've heard of wig rentals, but for some reason the idea of toupee rentals seems weirder.
Sunday London Mirror - Mar 11, 1973
In his 1983 book
Big Business Blunders: Mistakes in Multinational Marketing, David Ricks tells the following story:
A Japanese steel firm, Sumitomo, recently introduced its specialty steel pipe into the U.S. market. Sumitomo used a Tokyo-based, Japanese agency to help develop its advertisements. The steel was named "Sumitomo High Toughness," and the name was promoted by the acronym SHT in bold letters. So bold, in fact, that the full-page ads run in trade journals were three fourths filled with SHT. Located at the bottom of the page was a short message which ended with the claim that the product was "made to match its name." It simply cannot be overemphasized that local input is vital.
I've been able to find ads for SHT, such as the one below, but none exactly like the one that Ricks describes. Which doesn't mean the ad doesn't exist. Just that it isn't in any journals archived online.
Ocean Industry - July 1984
However, among the ads for SHT that I was able to find, I found one that actually improves (and possibly complicates) Ricks's story. Because it turns out that Sumitomo had another product, Sumitomo Calcium Treatment, that it abbreviated as SCAT.
Once I could accept as an honest mistake, but coming up with scatalogical abbreviations twice seems intentional. I'm guessing either someone at Sumitomo thought it was funny, or someone at the Japanese agency was having a joke at their expense.
Ocean Industry - March 1980
Classic business failure: "Hot Road," an eau de toilette released by Harley-Davidson in the mid-1990s and quietly discontinued a year or two later. It wasn't exactly an "on brand" product.
More info:
Milwaukee Magazine
image source: parfumo.net