That was easy!
“That was easy!”
That was easy! was a slogan of the Staples® chain of office-supply stores. It summarized how easy it is to do business with the company over the Internet, at least once the customer has enabled JavaScript, cookies, and local cacheing of viruses. It became so easy! to do business with Staples that no one entered the many "big box" stores except to hear exquisite echoes off the walls of deserted warehouses.
The button[edit]
Staples began selling "That was easy!" buttons, a battery-powered electronic device with no function other than to deliver the corporate slogan when the button was pressed.
The reason anyone would buy a button with which to help advertise Staples® is probably related to the reason people buy sweatshirts to help advertise Nike,® Old Navy,® or the Dallas Cowboys.®
It is perhaps a commentary on the present time that such a fine piece of precision technology could be manufactured with no purpose other than to deliver a slogan. However, Grandfather's generation gave us the rubber duck, equally pretty, equally useless, and incapable of using words at all but merely emitting a squeak at tub-side.
The squeak, incidentally, was itself a marketing slogan — of the 1940 Presidential campaign of Wendell Wilkie. Though the squeak was a storybook failure of marketing, most Americans preferred it to Wilkie's other slogan, "One World."
Other hot buttons[edit]
The author's girlfriend (whose nickname is also "Easy") is personified by this button, which the author occasionally places at her seat at the dinner table for activation when she sits down, although that is hardly the most remarkable use of that part of her anatomy.