Seymore Butts needs help. Not that kind of help - he needs help with the store locator he is launching on his Website. Namely, from store owners around the United States who carry his product or that would like to, in return for which they will benefit from free advertising courtesy of the Website's large viewership.
He's aiming to make his product more accessible to consumers around the country. "It's really in an answer to many requests made by fans who live in certain areas of the country and find it hard to locate my movies at stores," he said, announcing the locator. "These are generally people who stay away from Internet purchases and like to actually walk away with the product in hand after they buy it, and so in an effort to make it easier for old and new fans alike to find my products, I'm going to attempt to list every store in the United States on my site."
Butts wants to make the store locator searchable by zip codes and visual maps letting users find shops by clicking the state of their choice. Not to mention a little help saving gasoline.
"It's a win/win situation," he said. "Based on exhaustive studies we've done, we've calculated that people have wasted 262,000 gallons of gasoline searching for my product and ultimately have come up empty handed, so we want to do our part for the environment. The store wins because it gets more business, the fan wins because they're not wasting time and gas, and environment wins because less harmful emissions are released into the atmosphere."
Pure Play Media chief executive Richard Arnold said they've been swamped with requests for Butts product, largely thanks to the thrice-weekly reruns of Family Business, Butts's popular Showtime reality television show. "I think it's a great idea - we get a lot of requests from general public and if it helps people get his product that's a fantastic thing," Arnold said of the store locator plan.
"In light of his show there shouldn't be too many retailers who don't carry his product," Arnold continued, "but this will help the odd retailer that isn't while showing how lucrative it is for them to do so. The show is hitting a consumer that is outside of our regular consumer, and if that's driving these people to the local adult store that can only help everybody."
Butts, however, said it wasn't so much the TV show's success as the volume of letters "from people who tell me that they just went to five stores in their areas, and none of them are carrying my movies. Certainly, the amount of letters have increased since the TV show, and before it I was able to handle it, but now I can't do that."
He also believes the store locator will contribute to a reduction in highway crime. "I believe," he said, "that this move is going to reduce the incidence of road rage. From what I was told of the three most recent prominent road rage cases, they were on account of people on wild goose chases for my films, and they got so upset that they tried to kill somebody."
Whether or not you buy that scenario, you can at least buy that the Seymore Butts store locator will be up and running within 48 hours of this printing, "and we want to try to get as many stores up there as we can when we put it up," he said.
If you'd like to help with the store locator, send your name, address, telephone numbers, and store hours to Michael Goldberg. If you cannot e-mail, call (866) 820-3000, toll free.
