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At Park Fair, TLG lures mall rats to its laboratory, often rewarding them with cash or food. Once there, they might sit in the focus rooms and chew gum for hours to test new flavors, or they might examine a fleet of new banana-seat bicycles and comment on the colors and styles. All the while, clients can view the testing through two-way mirrors. For one test, 35 children came in to sample 34 different juices. Hey, it pays to go to the experts.
Ninety percent of the mall intercepts get $2 to $7 just to fill out a questionnaire, or they get a product to take home and try out. For those who put in more time, say, in a focus group, as much as $150 can be earned. And all this is done in the cozy comfort of thoroughly researched decor. Pinks and blues, says Teresa, are "calming colors."
Sometimes there's no advertising or fanfare when a company wants to test a product. A new sandwich just shows up on the menu at a fast-food restaurant, and the people of Des Moines have no idea they are the only rats in the national laboratory.
With millions of dollars at stake, you don't flip a coin. You ask Des Moines.
JOBS, JOBS, JOBS!
Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest. MARK TWAIN
They had it going here for a while. They had the carpets, yeah, but that wasn't all. This was both the carpet and the beauty-queen capital.
Which is not to say beauty does not still walk down the street in Dalton, Ga., and into the Oakwood for eggs and grits, or into Jimmy's for a cocktail. But the Miss Resaca Beach pageant is no more. It could be that when Marla Maples, who won the thing, ended up with Donald Trump as her trophy, it took the shine off the prize.
A girl doesn't need to leave Dalton to get herself a millionaire.
Zack Norville, who is one of them, is wearing a necktie with a print of $100 bills, and he's talking about what a fine place this is. "Very cosmopolitan for a small town in the South." He is the daddy, by the way, of another famous Daltonian blond: newswoman Deborah Norville is his little girl. Yep, Marla Maples and Deborah Norville, and that's just the start.
"I judged the last Miss Resaca pageant they had," says Zack, who owns a company that supplies raw materials to the 171 carpet manufacturers in Georgia. He's showing us the pictures in the poolroom out at his spread, which looks like J.R. Ewing's ranch. Zack says he's thinking about turning the front acreage into a landing strip for his Piper.
Things are good in Dalton. Per capita income is among the highest in the state at $24,773, and Zack Norville's warehouse manager, Travis Burns, drives a Jaguar, for crying out loud.
"There's a job here for every man, woman and baby at the breast," says Pastor Daniel Stack of St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church.
Here's this little place, 90 minutes north of Atlanta, where a woman named Catherine Evans Whitener (1880-1964) made a tufted chenille bedspread, and then another, and another, and then someone made a machine that did it faster, and then in 1996, 1.641 billion sq. yds. of carpet were shipped to every place from Hackensack to Hong Kong.
Three-fourths of the nation's $10 billion wholesale carpet is made here today. But alas, there is a problem in Dalton.
Things are so good, they ran out of workers.