If you're in Portland do me a favor? Buy a book at Broadway Books. No wait, buy 3 of em...
He usually tweeted his friends on the song that he happened to be listening to or on the results of his latest round of disc golf. But now the words came harder. Then inspiration struck.
...I'll buy you a burrito the next time I'm in town, Aaron typed.
He and his friends used burritos as code. It was cooler to say "I'll buy you a burrito" than "I owe you five bucks." He didn't know where the idea came from to connect burritos to his mother's predicament, but he liked the way it sounded. He decided to develop the connection further on his blog, everydaydude. The site was lucky to receive 20 hits a month, and half of those came from his mother, but what sharper tool lay at hand?
The madness that is the current state of affairs in our economy honestly hasn't bothered me much...My CEO has promised openly that our company will not be letting go of anyone. Thus, I've just managed to go about my business as usual. I'm not afraid to spend money on things I want...I own no stocks, don't even know how to buy em. I generally live check to check and I like it that way...Sometimes it takes a slap in the face to wake someone up...Yesterday I was on the receiving end of the wakeup call.
Aaron typed on, explaining the importance of Broadway Books, both to the Portland community and in his mother's life. He related how he had learned that the store was in crisis. He reported that he had sat at his desk near tears, but then his despair gave way to anger and finally to resolve. He announced to the blogosphere that he had hit on a scheme.
So, here's the deal. I'll be in Portland to visit January 15-19, 2009. Meet me at Cha Cha Cha on SE Hawthorne in Portland on January 16 at 6 pm with a receipt from Broadway Books for over $50, and I'm buying your kind ass a burrito. I've got about a grand left on my one credit card -- told you I was a simpleton -- which equates to roughly 166 of you spending at least 50 bucks a pop....I'd never feel better about diving into a thousand-dollar hole...Pass this along. Getcha a free burrito! Support local independent business! Get off of the internet/your ass!
Aaron paused. He was no writer; in fact, despite his book-loving parents, he wasn't all that much of a reader. But he knew that his posting needed a clincher.
Understand that the economic sting will subside, will also fade into nothingness. If that seems a long shot, consider it optimism, a virtue I learned from growing up the son of my mother.
After logging the post, Aaron scanned the links lining the right-hand margin of his webpage: Jerk Ethic, Hidden Booty, huk lab, Kamp Grizzly, Ministry of Imagery, BikePortland, Woot, Hypebeast. Why not try to leverage his plea, beam it out directly to his friends in the Portland area? Even a few more sales would give his mom a psychological boost. She and the store could at least go down swinging. He returned to Twitter to put up a link to his blog entry, and within a few minutes saw that a friend in Portland had retweeted his offer. By that afternoon, it had been retweeted 30 times.
The story quickly jumped the firewall between private and public phenomena. Over the next three days, everydaydude hosted three times as many visits as it had received in the previous two months. Friends reported to Aaron that they had received the link to his blog posting from strangers. In the Portland offices of Nike and Adidas, the posting was pasted onto companywide e-mails. At the Portland ad firm Wieden+Kennedy, Jeff Selis, a producer and longtime Broadway Books customer, received an e-mail from his son's tutor containing a link to Aaron's blog. Selis immediately forwarded it throughout the company. Aaron's loopy, heartfelt plea, in short, had gone viral. Still, his mother remained ambivalent about the venture. "I wasn't sure I approved," Dyer says. "I was touched by Aaron's thoughtfulness, but at the same time I was sensitive about the state of the store."
But the genie was out of the bottle. The day after the blog posting appeared, Broadway Books logged 12 more sales than on the same day the previous year. The uptick continued over the next few days. Instead of the store's usual middle-aged patrons, the new customers were in their 20s and 30s: young shoe designers at Nike and Adidas; stocking-capped, wired-in, bike-culture types. They all bought at least three or four books, so they were clearly responding to Aaron's plea. Dyer watched with bemusement and gratitude but with no real hope. The surge would soon fade, she thought, once the snow hit and the city shut down.
The first wave of the storm arrived on Monday, December 15. The air turned a baleful shade of slate gray, an Arctic wind raked, and ice snapped tree limbs and brought down power lines. The front swept out to sea, but before the ice could melt, another storm followed, this one pummeling the Portland area with a foot of snow. Dyer, who lived nearby, managed to open the store, but as she looked out on ice-coated Northeast Broadway, she assumed that the party was over.
Instead, it was just beginning. Hungry for holiday-themed content, local media picked up the heartwarming story about blogs, books, and burritos. An article about Aaron's quixotic gambit appeared in the online edition of a weekly alternative paper. A network TV affiliate produced a segment for the nightly news.
