goose@goldenegg.com

01:00 PM Feb 28, 2006

At the Sephora in downtown San Francisco, you'll need to look sharp and move fast upon ingress to avoid the sunny inquiries of a greeter -- not bereft of pulchritude -- concerned to know whether you have "yet" signed up for sephora.com.

Yes, Sephora wants your @hotmail address where you send all your business junk, or some made-up thing you think of on the spot, and they're willing to manufacture free samples by the thousands and pay an outgoing high school kid to hand them to you, and a (perhaps) more acne-bespotted one to enter them into a database at day's end.  A fine thing, for a firm dedicated to distilling revenue from the erogenous effervescence of musk ox mist, to lay down cash on the nail for these diaphanous threads by which we moderns hold one another at bay.

This is a company that values e-mail addresses.

And when you think about it -- and watch it in action, harvesting, let's say conservatively, an address every 90 seconds, 40 per hour per store for some multiple of minimum wage and a penny's worth of crap in a sample jar, what a bargain!  (The managerial glare of a bald-headed worthy whose arched eyebrows rudely demanded justification for my interest in the machinations of the company acquisition program forestalled a sub rosa interview with the sample-wielder that might have yielded firmer data, or at least a phone number.)  For a list self-selected of people proven to have sufficient interest in and means for the beauty industry's extract to walk in the door, and to have given you e-mailing permission besides.

Think the petitions, surveys, and bother-Congress-about-some-bill-Frist-will-ram-through-regardless campaigns you've been running out to ramp up your list are so much running in the hamster wheel?  Pay a visit to your Sephora and see what corporate America thinks an e-mail address is worth.

Or, ask Cravers, Matthews, Smith. 

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