Cheap and cheerful support
New word: "Unsourcing" involves companies setting up online communities to enable peer-to-peer support among users. Instead of speaking with a faceless person thousands of kilometres away, customers' problems are answered by individuals in the same country who have bought and used the same products. This happens either on the company's own website or on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and the helpers are generally not paid. (Source: Economist).
Bunny still filling in time
"A child's ... well-loved bunny was left in our Party Mad shop in Kingsland a while ago and we have waited for a desperate parent to return and ask if we found him," writes Greg. "The staff love having him around and his photo shoots are becoming more elaborate every week!"
Consumer flops
In Ann Arbor, Michigan, there is a warehouse full of products that didn't make it. Its nickname: the Museum of Failed Products. According to the Guardian, this is a "consumer capitalism's graveyard". "It's almost certainly the only place where you'll find Clairol's A Touch of Yogurt shampoo alongside Gillette's equally unpopular For Oily Hair Only and an empty bottle of Pepsi AM Breakfast Cola (born 1989; died 1990). The museum is home to caffeinated beer; to TV dinners branded with the logo of Colgate; to self-heating soup cans that exploded in customers' faces and to packets of breath mints that were withdrawn because they looked like the tiny packages of crack cocaine dispensed by America's street drug dealers. It is where microwaveable scrambled eggs - pre-scrambled and sold in a cardboard tube with a pop-up mechanism for easier consumption in the car - go to die."