Kids love monsters. Toy monsters, pretend monsters, monsters in the closet, under the bed, in their head, are a staple of childhood. I always loved playing with them and loved watching movies about them. I do so hope that there really are some monsters left in the world.  

            

The world once teemed with monsters of all sorts, but that population has been decimated by the spread of civilization and those that remain are confined to preserves and zoological gardens.

            

Or not.  

 

Maybe, just maybe, in the depths of the oceans or the deepest, most remote forests or Himalayan snowfields, some real monsters may yet exist.

 

 

 

Surely the elusive Giant Squid would qualify, and we do know that it exists from some very real and tangible evidence of saucer size sucker scars on the bodies of sperm whales. A tentacle with twin rows of saucer-diameter suckers (two rows of 8” suckers side by side) must be one big sucker of an arm on one very big sucker of a squid.

 

Gerrick Johnson of BMO Capital Markets (a lovely fellow by the way, you should have the pleasure of making his acquaintance) is a keen observer and a fan of the toy industry. Recently he reported that Walmart's pricing is less aggressive than we have seen in recent years, which is good news.

 

 

 

Walmart typically sells promotable products below their cost, as a loss leader to draw in customers. Such below-cost selling of highly promoted products is negative in several ways: 

            

1. It gives the consumer an unrealistic expectatation of what toys of that sort should sell for, perhaps making them less willing to pay the normal price for other toys where the retailer margin is included in the retail price. That unrealistic expectation of what a toy should cost can carry over in the consumers' minds to other product categories, and perhaps into the following year, causing them resist purchases of toys at normal retail prices. This can have long term negative effects on toy sales.

            

2.  Let’s see, what was 2? Oh, right! Predatory pricing forces other retailers to also sell at a loss, OR cancel orders for that promotable product because they cannot compete with the artificially low price that has been set. The end result is that the toys will ultimately sell fewer units because Walmart will be the only game in town selling it. The toy manufacturers and even the inventors suffer.  

 

 

 

Do you have any thoughts on other negative consequences of predatory, below wholesale, and loss leader selling of lead promotable toy products? I'm sure there are more unintended consequences. Thankfully, so far this year the above seems not to be happening, and that is a good thing. So far.

 

Sam's brother kept the skull in his basement rec-room bar, once a staple of middle America. When he would go down there he would often see the rocking chair rocking gently. Thinking it a breeze from an open window, he made sure all the basement windows were closed securely, but still the chair would rock.

            

On one occasion his wife was in the kitchen, leaning on the counter watching a TV in the next room, when she felt a slap on her bum. “Stop that, Paul!” she yelled at her husband, assuming he was standing behind her and had administered that mildly painful smack. 

 

Her husband answered from the bedroom at the other end of the house, and she spun around to find nothing. No one was there. Odd.

            

 

 

Odd things continued to happen, until one day Paul was taking a shower in a bathroom without a window, when a wind came up and wrapped the shower curtain around him. That was it. He pulled shower curtain and rod down, clamped them tightly to himself, strode directly to the basement, took the skull and dumped it in the trash.

            

And there the story ends, only to begin again when someone finds a skull in the garbage and takes it home as décor. How many times has this story been repeated over the decades, or centuries perhaps? And how many more times will it be found, and discarded, and found and . . . ?

Ghostbusters is one of my all-time favorite movies, and one of my all-time favorite toy lines as well. I would love to be a Ghostbuster, and/or a monster hunter. I could have my own TV show, or not. I just might do it one day. If any of you would like to spend a week in the deep woods of the Pacific Northwest looking for Big Foot, give me a jingle and let’s give it a go. 

            

I would love to live in an haunted house, I think, as I hope to see a ghost before I leave this earthly abode, and maybe a monster or two as well. I have known people who lived in haunted houses or had vivid encounters with inexplicable events and creatures.

 

 

 

My good friend Sam had a brother who was a trash collector. No doubt you'd find a lot of strange things in that line of work. One day he found a skull in a garbage can and took it home. A human skull, to be exact.

 

Soon afterward strange things began to happen . . .