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Hallmark Adds Extra Love at Safeway
The greeting card company dangled a free Valentine's package of Hershey Co.'s Kisses Mars Inc.'s M&M's or Dove with purchase of three cards. Right-angle shelf signs amidst the card racks supported. Safeway chains also offered a free plush puppy for shoppers who bought three Expressions from Hallmark cards. (The offers were mutually exclusive.) Shelf talkers and dump bins carrying the premium communicated the offer. Safeway also provided endcap placement for Hallmark stationery products leading up to the holiday. Hallmark hosted similar "three-card" programs at other retailers: Stop & Shop dangled a free "Rose Bouquet Heart Chocolate Box" with three-card purchase; CVS offered a sound-enabled plush puppy for $4.99; Sears sold a "Be Mine" plush bear for $2.99; Kroger more simply pitched a free fourth card.
The Cost of Valentine's Day
If you haven't ordered Valentine Day flowers yet and you're wondering what the competition plans on doing, the National Retail Federation says they're planning to buy, buy, buy. It's estimated that consumers will spend nearly $17 billion dollars on gifts, candy, cards and other trinkets this year. (That's about $3 billion more than was spent last Valentine's Day.3) In Savannah, you won't need to spent quite that much to treat your sweetheart. Betty Nease-Hagin from the Pink House Florist says they have bouquets in all colors and price ranges. "It's definitely a production line here at pink house florist," She tells me as we go to a backroom where four employees are busily preparing bouquets. Nease-Hagin shows me several mixed rose bouquets that cost $65.00 and says she has things far above that in price but also less expensive. "anything from $25.00 all the way up to $200.00 or more," she says.
Roles of smell, sleep in memory studied / Subjects who got whiff while dozing remembered better
Scientists studying how sleep affects memory have found that the whiff of a familiar scent can help a slumbering brain better remember things that it learned the evening before. A rose bouquet -- delivered to people's nostrils as they studied and, later, as they slept -- improved their performance on a memory test by almost 15 percent. The new study, appearing today in the journal Science, is the first rigorous test of odor on human memory during sleep. The results -- whether they can help students cram for tests -- clarify the picture of what the sleeping brain does with newly studied material, and of what it takes for this process to succeed. Researchers have long known that sleep is crucial to laying down new memories, and studies in the 1980s and '90s showed that exposing the sleeping brain to cues associated with learning -- the sound of clicking, for instance -- could enhance the process.
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