Defining “Soon”

Movie studios are the worst. You watch those previews in the beginning of your movie and they all say, “Coming soon to a theater near you.” And it never fails that you see previews for a handful of movies that you are all excited about, right? And you think, “OH MAN! I am SO going to see that!”

And then you go home and you keep the movie listings watched for a few weeks ... but none of those movies ever come to the theater near you.

Eventually you just forget all about them. Six months later something makes your brain flash for a second and you think, “Hey! Wasn’t there a movie coming out that I wanted to see? What was it?”

Until finally, a year later (or more), one of those movies you were so pumped up to go out and pay $10+ to see is actually playing at the theater.

And now you don’t even care.

Well ... maybe it’s just me. But that’s about where I am with OPI’s gel polish.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve gone through a similar issue with each promised new line, color collection, and supposedly wonderful LED lamp for the last year and a half now. But right now I’m irritated that I have been looking at full page and double-truck ads in the trade magazines for MONTHS promising me that I will “soon” be able to give my clients their favorite brand of polish with all the benefits of the growing collection of gel polishes (in a polish bottle) that have started replacing my traditional polishes.

I finally wandered down to my local OPI distributor — against my better judgment, I can’t stand that place — only to, once again, have to shove my body between the still-packed boxes of inventory that litter the middle of the only aisle that features nail products to find, once again, un-stocked shelves of half-lines of nail products — none of which were the new OPI gel polish I’ve been waiting for.

First of all: I would like these annoying “teaser” ads to give a *#@&!ing date of when the products will be available. Second of all: I would like all the companies to actually manage to have the products on the date they give. And third: The four to six month lead time that I’ve been noticing is just enough to exceed my attention span.

Trust me. You want me to still be excited to spend hundreds — nay, thousands! — of dollars for whatever fancy new thing you are introducing. Especially if that fancy “new” thing already has a plethora of just-as-good-as-yours competitor products that have already been available for me to spend my money on for the last two years or more. At this rate, even my clients are only lukewarm about the new OPI gel polishes.