The Hoover story (decline chapter) goes beyond the legendary sales promotion. The former factory in Perivale, West London was an Art Deco masterpiece, that clo

The Hoover story (decline chapter) goes beyond the legendary sales promotion. The former factory in Perivale, West London was an Art Deco masterpiece, that closed down in 1982. There was manufacturing in South Wales (the 'China' of it's day) and that factory finally closed about a decade ago. This factory also did the contract manufacturing for the Sinclair C5. The actual promotion was not that wild a deal. If you look at the privatisations that the UK public were offered you can see some true gift-horses. If you bought shares in anything the government were flogging off then you made a lot of money. You also were bought - you could be expected to vote Conservative from then on - 'brand loyal'. If we look at the VC funded things that go on today, every early Uber ride was a 'sales promotion'. Same with the early days of Amazon where money was not so important. Even online groceries sales are a bit speculative. What is sad is the lack of genuine offers from today's brands. In the olden days competitions would have a 'tie breaker' to complete, nowadays they want you to text or call a premium rate number that costs enough to pay for the promotion. In the 1980's a typical 'really good promotion' could be something like the Weetabix Lego offer. If you bought a dozen packs of Weetabix cereal then you would have enough tokens to get a really good and quite exclusive Lego set, or, if you didn't want to have 576 Weetabix biscuits to eat then you could pay retail equivalent for the Lego offer. There was nothing disingenuous about it and any delay in shipping (28 days of delivery was never realistic) only added to the excitement and anticipation. I don't know why but in the days before the internet when everything had to be manually transcribed from posted-in forms the offers and promotions were just that bit more honest. Stuff wasn't cheap and made in China then. The Hoover disaster marks the end of this happy chapter of consumerism.