Controversy and Criticisms
After being featured on the Oprah’s Favorite Things segment, businesses typically experience a large boost in their website traffic and in visits to their stores. For small businesses with limited resources and a small staff, the resulting boost in customers can cause the business to become overwhelmed and unable to meet customer demands. According to Scott Schroeder, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Garrett Popcorn Shops, being featured on the episode resulted in over 100,000 hits to the website on the afternoon the episode was aired and sales increased in December by over 100%. This caused the business to go from "making popcorn eight hours a day to 24 hours a day."
The episodes have also met with controversy when businesses that were not featured on the episode made claims that they were. According to show insiders, this is one reason the format was changed for the 2006 season.
The website The AV Club made fun of the uselessness and blandness of Oprah's 2007 list by posting a feature called 'Oprah's Favorite Thing or Symptom of Clinical Depression?" The 2008 decision to use inexpensive gifts drew jokes from Jimmy Kimmel Live!, including a mash-up that featured Winfrey supposedly giving away thumb tacks, to a much-dismayed audience.
Further criticism and satire have been directed at the reactions from the people in the audience, which typically range anywhere from cheering and screaming to crying from men and women alike. A memorable parody of this was featured on a Saturday Night Live skit, where the audience tore the studio apart in their frenzied anticipation of the freebies they would get. Winfrey herself has admitted amusement by some of the audience reactions, having made a certain amount of fun of them in a behind-the-scenes series that aired on Oprah Winfrey Network.
Read more about this topic: Oprah's Favorite Things
Famous quotes containing the words controversy and/or criticisms:
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments ... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)