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Don't Praise The Machine (DPTM)
Ooshies Fever: The Supermarket Toy Turning Parents Feral
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Woolworths just ran one of the most successful marketing campaigns in Australian retail history. It was free, plastic, and aimed squarely at six-year-olds.
This week Alex and John dig into Ooshies: the blind-bag Disney toys that took over Australian supermarkets, gave Woolworths' share price a boost, dented Coles', and turned primary school playgrounds into trading floors. We'll get into the psychology behind blind-bag toys (it's the same intermittent-reinforcement mechanism that makes slot machines addictive), the $30,000 rare-donkey eBay listing that wasn't quite what it seemed, and why it's parents, not kids, actually driving the spend.
Send this one to the friend in your life who's currently a few hundred dollars deep chasing a rubber Wolverine.
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