Newspaper Companies Warm Up to Homeless

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Knowing they have a product that might help turn around their industry’s financial woes, newspaper owners are warming up to the homeless people living along the curbs and in the alleyways outside their downtown office buildings.  That product, developed by a Toronto company, is known as THE 15 BELOW JACKET.

In a manner that’s likely to garner front-page headlines in every major American city, THE 15 BELOW JACKET marries fashion and utility with a socially-responsible means via which cash-strapped newspaper companies can turn homeless citizens into a new, previously-untapped demographic from which they can draw revenue.

THE 15 BELOW JACKET, according to the company’s web site, features multiple pockets throughout the lining — two in the hood, four in the chest, one large pocket in the back and one down each sleeve — that can be filled with old newsprint in keeping with the company slogan, “Yesterday’s information becomes today’s insulation.”

The newspaper executives able to prove the concept (i.e., to convince homeless people to buy the special jackets and to convince homeless people to buy unsold/unsellable copies of their newspapers for use as insulation inside those jackets) will be among the first to put their newspapers in the black.

Proving that concept, however, will require newspaper executives to conquer at least two more obstacles that remain between their companies and profitability:

• FIRST, they must find a way to ensure every homeless person can afford to purchase his or her own 15 BELOW JACKET; and

• SECOND, they must find a way to ensure every homeless person can afford to buy the unsold/unsellable copies of their newspapers.

Because the last two obstacles will be very difficult to conquer, it won’t surprise me if newspaper executives opt to join their banker, insurance and automaker friends and ask Congress for a bailout in 2009.

Hat tip:  Springwise

-- Bob McCarty Writes