The first of many shipments already on its way to New York
By MICHAEL HINMAN
Source: SyFy Portal
May-21-2007
When the first orders for nuts started to trickle in to his family's 78-year-old business Friday, Jeffrey Braverman had no idea what he was getting himself into.
About 50 orders had been placed in a short time to New Jersey retailer Nuts Online, all in reference to a television show called "Jericho," a show that Braverman said he barely had heard of, let alone watch.
"When we first started getting these orders, and we realized what was going on, my first thought was, 'What are these weirdos doing?' It was bizarre," Braverman told SyFy Portal's Michael Hinman. "But you know what? These are real people. These are normal people. They have been calling up, and these are some real nice people and I understood where they were coming from."
Braverman thought about one of his favorite television shows, "Lost," and how he would feel if suddenly ABC pulled it off the air like CBS did with "Jericho." That's when he realized his company would do whatever they could to help fans of "Jericho" make a statement with its "Nuts to You, CBS!" campaign. And Tuesday morning, the network's New York offices will have more than 1,000 pounds of peanuts -- enough to make more than 2,000 people quite satisfied -- sitting in its mailroom.
"These people are really hoping that this will make an impact, and I don't think they'll be disappointed," Braverman said. "In this first order alone, we have 40 25-pound boxes of nuts being shipped. It's kind of hard to ignore that."
Sending nuts is not cheap, and usually involves quite a bit more than a few dollars to order and ship, Braverman said. But as the individual orders grew from a handful to hundreds, he knew Nuts Online had to open things up for more fans to participate. So the company, through its new "Nuts for Jericho" page, decided to take the bold step of offering nuts sales in bulk wholesale, meaning even if fans were just donating $5, they could contribute to an overall pool of nuts that would then be sent to CBS as they were being prepared. At last count early Monday evening, fans had ordered more than 1,801 pounds of nuts through the wholesale method, spending about $2,440. And that number continues to grow, Braverman said.
"It's not necessarily profitable to us," Braverman said. "But in the long term, we really hope people appreciate it. It was crazy for us trying to fill orders. Normally, our shipper leaves at 5 p.m. but we still had about 450 pounds of nuts to go, so they stayed late and let us get it done."
The issues raised from taking the orders went beyond whether the venture would be profitable or not, however, Braverman said. There also was a concern that CBS might reject the shipments, and cost Nuts Online -- a family-owned business steeped in tradition -- even more money.
"That would be bad, because we would have to pay for it to come back, and we would have all this product that people had already paid for," Braverman said. "But we put notes on the cases asking them to please don't discard the cases. They are all freshly roasted peanuts, so give them to co-workers, or donate them to a good cause. Put them to good use."
Nuts Online is one of several companies fans had targeted to ship nuts, a play on some of the final dialogue of the "Jericho" series that Jake Green (Skeet Ulrich) says to the sheriff of New Bern when asked to surrender. It was his way of telling the advancing soldiers from that town to go to hell. Fans have since adopted that as their own mantra, and hope to do for Jericho what tabasco sauce a few years ago did for UPN's "Roswell."
With the orders have come hundreds of pieces of e-mail to the nuts company, something Braverman said he has been spending a great deal of time personally responding to.
"I'm literally sending hundreds of e-mails back to people," he said. "It's an amazing thing. You have all these people coming out of the woodwork, and they are thanking us. People are telling us that we had made their day, and that they are really happy."
And CBS might want to take note, because Braverman wants CBS to give "Jericho" a chance, so that he can give it a chance as a viewer.
"People were calling up and placing orders on the phone, and when they were doing it, they were giving us the lowdown on the show," Braverman said. "Now I want to go watch it on the [CBS] Web site. This has a chance to bring in so many more viewers, people who have never seen the show before who see all this and now want to watch the show. It's great how something like this can be passed along to brothers and sisters and friends, and how it can really grow an audience."
To take part in the "Nuts to You, CBS" campaign, visit the Nuts Online "Jericho" page by
clicking here.
Source