What does this say about America?
Apparently, there is an online company out there called CafePress.com that specializes in selling T-shirts related to political sex scandals.
According to an email I received, shortly after the news broke about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s love child, “consumers immediately started getting busy designing T-shirts inspired by the salacious news.”
Next, with a straight face the people at CafePress offered a full analysis of the sales figures for their snarky shirts:
“In fact, although Arnold’s affair-themed merchandise has been available on CafePress for less than a month, it already makes up 4 percent of all political sex scandal T-shirt sales on the site.
“Here is how the other infamous philanderers from Capitol Hill (sic) stack up:
* Bill Clinton’s scandal with Monica Lewinsky happened years before CafePress was founded, yet makes up a whopping 66 percent of all political sex scandal T-shirt sales.
* John Edward’s affair generates 13 percent of political sex scandal T-shirt sales.
* Elliot Spitzer’s ‘Client 9’ status drives over 7 percent of political sex scandal T-shirt sales.
* Mark Sanford and his scandal along the Appalachian Trail accounts for 8 percent of political sex scandal T-shirt sales.”
Of course, we all know what’s coming next – Anthony Weiner T-shirts with every conceivable play on words that is connected to his surname.
Cafepress allows anyone to design shirts about anything and upload them to the site to be printed. Cafepress doesn't specialize other than custom shirts, coffee mugs, etc. As long as there isn't any copyright infringement, they really don't care what you print. But as a company, they're no more geared towards political scandal than say, a newspaper. It's a small part of the overall business model dictated by what people say/do/want
http://www.zazzle.com is the same, as are numerous other sites, but saying that that cafepress specializes in scandal merchandise is more of a stretch than saying General Motors specializes in selling windshields.