Edible Garbage and Disposable Undershirts

Filed in archive General on June 25, 2008

I'm going to show my age here, but I read a blog post today that reminded me of the 1982 movie Night Shift, starring Michael Keaton and Henry Winkler. At one point in the movie, Keaton's character, Billy Blaze, who is always looking for entrepreneurial ideas (such as running a prostitution service out of the morgue), grabs the tape recorder he carries around to record ideas and says something like "Business idea: Edible Garbage."

I loved that movie and love that line.

Anyway, what brought this to mind was this post at Get Rich Slick:

With airlines charging $15 for first bag checked and some charging $25 to $50 for second bag checked, it's become obvious that a new era of disposable clothes is needed.

Mr. Slick goes on to suggest disposable underwear, socks, undershirts and pajamas as potential items to lighten the load in travelers' suitcases. Just buy your disposable clothing at your destination and leave it behind.

While this might be questionable environmentally (unlike the edible garbage idea, which was environmental before environmental was cool), I think it would be smart for a hotel chain that wanted some publicity to explore it further. If you could woo travelers with free undershirts (or bras?) and pajamas (not sure on the underwear and socks) and marketed it as a way to travel cheaper, some people might take that offer. Even if no one decided to stay at your hotel due to this offering, you could get untold mountains of free publicity simply by letting the media know that you are offering it. You could do even better if you could show that you made the PJs out of some material that could then be easily broken down with no harm to the environment - maybe have a big compost pit near the hotel, that would be a cool TV visual, yes?

Good idea, Slick.