Wednesday, 5/12

Wait. Trenary has a Dollar General store?

I'm back from my day off, a day in which Loraine and I decided to give her car a much needed road trip and made our way to Green Bay, where we picked up Loraine some soccer cleats and both of us a haul of chocolate from Aldi.

I don't know who was happier in the end—Loraine's car, or us.

Aside from the shock of seeing Trenary, population a couple of hundred, with a brand new Dollar General store on US-41, the biggest discovery of the day had to do with marketing. Now, I'd like to think I know a little about marketing; it's one of the eighteen or so jobs I do on a daily basis. And as we were leaving Green Bay I saw something that just seemed so...perfect that I had to applaud the people who came up with the idea and then implemented it.

As you leave Green Bay heading north toward Michigan, there are a plethora of billboards reminding people that they're just a couple of hours away from legal cannabis. That's right—there were a ton of billboards for the Fire Station in Marquette and Lume in Escanaba telling Wisconsin residents that legal weed is just a drive away.

Genius.

I'm actually being quite serious about this. Michigan has legal marijuana, while Wisconsin doesn't. So instead of buying it from some dude on the street corner, you could just hop in your car and drive a couple of hours. There, you can shop to your heart's content, from people who know more about it than the dude on the street corner. Not only that, but you can't get arrested for buying it. It's legal to do that here.

Of course, for Wisconsin residents, I'm sure the flaw is that once you cross the state border with it in your possession you CAN get arrested, but that's a problem for another day.

The marketing aspect of it is genius.

Now, I have no idea how many people would actually drive up to Marquette or Escanaba just to buy their herb, but that might actually be incidental to the whole vibe the billboards give off. On the way, I also saw billboards for NMU featuring a surfer and for Travel Marquette featuring bike racers. Combined with the pot billboards, it would give someone traveling to Marquette the impression that this is one of the coolest places on the face of the Earth.

And for once, those billboards wouldn't be lying.

If things go the way I'm guessing, I'm venture that Wisconsin will join Michigan in having legal cannabis sooner rather than later. That's just the way the things are going these days. And when that happens, those billboards won't have quite the impact they do now. But for now, it was something that stood out, and stood out in a good way.

Almost as much, in fact, as the new Dollar General store in Trenary!

(jim@wmqt.com)