Just the thought of the bare bones floor-to-ceiling warehouse atmosphere overwhelmed me. Adding to my excitement: I had no choice but to bring along my two kids. Let the adventure begin!

As we made our way to the big box, I spent the drive bartering with the kids. No freak outs and we’d get cookies at the grocery. Let Mama get the items on her list and I’ll grab you lipgloss at Target. Anything to let me get in and out as quickly as possible. I’m that kind of mom.

Little did I know that once we stepped inside, I would barely be able to pry them out of the store.

As soon as we arrived, we were greeted with balloons at the door. It was “Kids Workshop Day” at Home Depot, they explained… a free hands-on clinic on the first Saturday of every month. I had heard about it but never really thought to attend. Assuming I was only there to make crafts, they practically ushered us into the back room – boy am I glad they did.

As the girls donned their little personalized orange aprons and safety glasses, they were each handed a “planter box in a bag.” With a little hammering and a bit of wood glue, we had a structure that was ready to decorate. Some stickers, paint and voila! We spent nearly an hour making our planter box. As the girls marveled over their creations and munched on free popcorn, I got my shopping done in a jiffy. It was an errand to remember.

The Home Depot gained three new female fans and you can bet we’ll be the first to don our orange aprons at the next event in June!

Every year, a handful of controversial bills dominate attention at the legislature. Abortion, bonding and the Vikings stadium are among the issues that have sucked up the policy oxygen and gotten the bulk of media coverage this session.

But each year, other bills quietly make their way into law – the product not of high-powered lobbying campaigns, but of hard work by citizens and legislators intent on improving public policy.

One such bill was signed by Gov. Mark Dayton and takes effect Aug. 1. It addresses an area of law that predates Minnesota’s constitution – yet which in more than 150 years had developed into a maze of unwritten rules that weren’t always clear even to its most experienced practitioners.

The topic: receivership, a process akin to bankruptcy in which a court takes control of an asset and appoints a guardian – a receiver – to manage the asset and ensure it’s not wasted.

Before you start yawning, consider that receivers have been at the heart of many of the high-profile fraud cases in the news recently, in Minnesota and elsewhere. Receivers have been appointed in the cases involving Bernie Madoff, Tom Petters and Trevor Cook.

Receivers are also increasingly being brought into real estate foreclosure cases to manage the foreclosed properties. Each year in Minnesota, receivers are appointed in thousands of cases. Yet although Minnesota law contains 299 separate references to the appointment of receivers, there’s not a single mention of how receivers should operate, how they should be held accountable for the assets under their control and how they should report to the court on the assets with which they are entrusted.

“The world has gotten so much more complicated, and there is so much in these receiverships,” said Jim Baillie, a senior partner with the Minneapolis law firm Fredrikson & Byron who led a two-year effort that developed the receiver bill.

“There are few rules on receiverships, and what we found when we dug into them was that nobody is following them,” Baillie said. “Either people didn’t know about them, or they were antiquated. For example, there was a rule stating that the receiver must keep a written receipt for every expenditure over $1. Yet there was no rule on who could actually be a receiver.”

The effort was set in motion by Jim Bartholomew, an accountant with Lighthouse Management Group who’s one of the Twin Cities’ busiest receivers. He and Baillie rounded up a group of about 15 lawyers from seven or eight firms that met more than 20 times and spent countless pro-bono hours drafting a bill to take to the legislature. Rep. Joe Hoppe (R-Chaska) and Rep. Steve Simon (DFL- St. Louis Park) sponsored the bill, which made its way through both houses without controversy.

Ned Wahl, a partner at Faegre Baker Daniels in Minneapolis and a member of the drafting committee, said the experience was a refreshing exercise in civic duty.

“Normally in a situation like this a lawyer would be working for a client, lobbying and trying to get a law that was the best for the client,” Wahl said. “In this case, we tried to be neutral – to write a clear and fair law.”

Baillie said the new receiver law will make the process more transparent and easier to understand for everyone involved – not only the public, but also lawyers and even judges.

“In the old system, there might be rights or opportunities that could be missed if one lawyer knew the unwritten rules and the other didn’t,” Baillie said. “And often times the judge wouldn’t know, either. Now the playing field will be more level for everyone, and people’s rights will be better protected.”

This is John Reinan’s weekly business column for MinnPost.com.

Brand loyalty is a tough thing to earn and sustain. I know, I know, this is not a particularly insightful observation to make. Marketers have been hearing for years about how gaining loyalists is as difficult as ever with with less consumer disposable income, more competitors, the powers of social media, etc. I bring it up now because I recently was very close to ending a long-standing relationship with a brand and want to discuss why.

I’m not always proud of it, but I’m an HBO brand loyalist. I regrettably paid for the premium cable channel as a college student who probably would have been better of investing his money on textbooks, food healthier than Jack’s pizzas, gas for his car, etc. But the content was so good, and as a film and media studies student, I couldn’t resist. Through think and thin, I’ve been a subscriber ever since. But a few months ago I almost did finally pull the plug. Allow me to take you through a quick series of events.

December 2011: HBO cancels two programs I enjoyed, “Bored to Death” and “How To Make It In America.” I stuck with them through the post-”Sopranos” phase, but this was different. The newest programming was just getting boring, so after several years of allegiance, I vowed to cancel my subscription.

February 2012: HBO announces its streaming service, HBO Go, would be coming to Xbox 360 consoles on April 1, 2012, allowing subscribers to access any episode of any season of any series whenever they want. I decide to wait and see.

April 2012: I install the HBO Go application, fire up a classic episode of “The Wire” and think ”Dammit, just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” Bravo, HBO. Your customer retention tactics had me uttering quotes from “The Godfather.”

Good for them. Pulling off what I’m referring to as “The ‘Godfather’ Customer Moment” is no easy feat, but the company’s savvy digital experiment to bring added value to its subscribers got me stick with ‘em. And that’s what it takes to retain customers in this era: prove that you’re listening, show that you’re willing to take risks, and embrace new tools that bring quality services to customers.

And, in case you’re wondering, I wasn’t frustrated like Al Pacino in the clip above, nor did I have a heart attack upon being lured back in, but whenever there’s an opportunity to reference “The Godfather,” I figure you’ve got to take it. What are some other interesting case studies of when companies pulled this type of move off successfully? Or better yet, can you apply other marketing lessons to quotes from “The Godfather”?

How many of you practice the art of “showrooming” — otherwise know as checking out products at stores, before buying the exact same item online for a cheaper price? It’s been going on for years, but it’s gaining popularity as technology allows seamless and instantaneous comparison shopping. You can count me among the millions of people who fall into this category. I don’t do it regularly, but I’ve scouted out everything from televisions to books before purchasing at Amazon.com for less.

And “showrooming” is taking a serious toll on the big box stores who are not well positioned to adapt. They’ve got a ton of overhead costs, including sales staff who take the time to answer questions and educate consumers only to have them go online and buy elsewhere. They’re also required to collect sales tax, unlike internet retailers.

Sure, they’re trying to evolve, but it is a seriously uphill battle. Target, for example, is pushing suppliers to create custom products specifically for their stores. Seems like a good idea, but if the products are just “different” instead of markedly better, consumers will simply comparison shop elsewhere for big-ticket items.

Perhaps the hardest hit company has been Best Buy, which some have called “Amazon’s Showroom.” Reports say they lost $1.2 billion last year by discounting prices. They also just announced the closing of 50 stores and significant layoffs. So what’s the solution? If I had the answer, I would’ve thrown my hat in the ring for the company’s CEO position that opened up on Tuesday.

But here’s what I do know. They can’t compete on price alone. They need a differentiator that is not only relevant to consumers, but cannot be offered online. The internet retailers are crushing them because the stores don’t offer enough extra value. The brick and mortar stores should find a way to make shopping with them more of a premium experience — one that justifies the extra spend. That means more than a polite and knowledgeable sales staff. It means re-orienting their focus around support after the purchase. And it likely means a smaller footprint than we’re used to seeing. What they can afford to do will be up to the bean counters, but here are some thoughts:

• Instant delivery and installation (free and quicker than their online counterparts can offer)

• Free, in-store tutorials on how to get the most out of your purchase

• Stellar, on-site repairs and tech support

• Exclusive membership for loyal in-store shoppers (providing much more than traditional rewards programs)

• Extend warranties (even if it’s for a short period) for products purchased in store

Best Buy plans to test a new store concept called its “connected store,” which I’ve heard will mimic some of what Apple stores offer. I’m eager to see what they come up with. And I’m hoping they can transition quickly enough to save themselves.

Sue Kruskopf (left), Nancy Bush pitch MyWonderfulLife on ABC-TV's "Shark Tank."

Funeral directors joke that the last real innovation in their business was the hearse. A pair of Minneapolis entrepreneurs hopes to update that punch line.

MyWonderfulLife.com is a free site that allows members to plan their own end-of-life celebration. Do you want Van Morrison played at your funeral? Want your Uncle Morty to read from the Bhagavad Gita? Prefer to ban smoking at your wake? You can specify all this, and more, by building a personalized plan.

The site is the creation of Minneapolis entrepreneurs Sue Kruskopf and Nancy Bush. Launched three years ago, it has more than 11,000 members and recently got some high-profile promotion when Kruskopf and Bush sought venture capital in an appearance on the ABC reality show “Shark Tank.”

The inspiration for the site was both cultural and personal, said Kruskopf, whose day job is CEO of the advertising agency Kruskopf Coontz.

“I loved the HBO show ‘Six Feet Under,’ ” she said. “And right around that time, the movie ‘The Bucket List’ came out. Meanwhile, my dear friend Nancy’s husband died. We threw an incredible funeral, and people were coming up to us and asking, ‘How can I make sure my funeral is like this?’ ”

With her marketing background, Kruskopf realized there was an opportunity to tap into the trend toward personalization.

“We are all control freaks,” she said. “We document everything. We have all the songs we want on our iPods, we choose the information we want to read.”

And Baby Boomers – who are entering the end stages of life’s journey – aren’t interested in having the same kind of funeral as their parents.

MyWonderfulLife.com is an example of a growing trend in marketing: agencies not just selling products for their clients, but actually creating and marketing products that they own themselves. I recently wrote for MinnPost about Lakemaid Beer, a seasonal brew created by the Minneapolis marketing agency Pocket Hercules.

So far, MyWonderfulLife hasn’t turned a profit. The site has a deal with a national brokerage group to offer funeral pre-pays to its members, and it gets commissions from that. But the founders’ appearance on “Shark Tank,” with its 6 million viewers, has generated interest, Kruskopf said.

“That has propelled interest from multiple angles – things we would never have thought of,” she said. “We’re starting to see multiple revenue models that can make this profitable.”

Kruskopf, 54, said her venture may provide her with some insurance against the ups and downs of the notoriously ageist advertising business.

“I’m getting older in advertising,” she said with a laugh. “But I’ll never be old in the death business!”

This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost.com.

Sometimes these conventional units make it hard for us to grasp the value of various goods and services. You might be used to paying $4.50 for a pint of strawberries … but how do you feel about paying a quarter for one strawberry?

It’s an enlightening exercise to examine prices of things outside of their traditional measures. We’re used to seeing this type of analysis for cigarettes ($2,500 per year for a pack-a-day smoker!) or for interest payments over the term of a 30-year mortgage.

I decided to re-frame the costs of other everyday purchases. These are things my family of four in St. Paul routinely buys.

Pure Maple Syrup
Cost: $7.95 for 16 oz. bottle
Alternate View: $63.60 per gallon
Verdict: Mixed. This is pure maple syrup made by Hamel Maple Syrup Co. in Minnesota, not the stuff made from high-fructose corn syrup. It’s a delicious family favorite. Still, that’s an eye-popping number for a gallon.

Garbage Collection
Cost: $62 every three months
Alternate View: $5.17 per pickup
Verdict: A bargain. I’ll gladly pay a fiver for some guy in a big truck to come by my house every week and haul away all my garbage.

Electricity
Cost: $2,159 in 2011
Alternate View: $5.92 per day
Verdict: Fair price. When I think about running the refrigerator, the laundry machines, the lights, the computer, etc., I figure $6 a day isn’t too bad.

Printer Ink
Cost: $11.99 for HP 564 Black (1.1 ounces)
Alternate View: $1,395 per gallon
Verdict: A ripoff. I know I’m not the first guy to complain about the cost of printer ink, but this one drives me nuts. It’s the classic “give-’em-the-razor-and-sell-’em-the-blades” business model. I’ve investigated the less expensive third-party ink providers and found the forums full of warnings about compatibility issues.

Water & Sewer Service
Cost: $415 for 2011
Alternate View: $1.14 per day
Verdict: A bargain. Clean running water for a family of four, plus disposal of the waste water, for a buck a day? Seriously, how much longer will this last?

Dog Grooming
Cost: $80 for standard poodle
Alternate View: $4,800 in a lifetime
Verdict: Mind-blowing. Poodles have hair, not fur. So they don’t shed (great!), but they need haircuts (drag!). This estimate is based on five haircuts per year for 12 years, the average life span of a standard poodle. Is not having to vacuum dog hair every day (the advantage of owning a poodle over a breed that sheds) worth nearly $5,000 grand over 12 years? How do you put a dollar value on love?

Coffee
Cost: $7.50 per bag of Caribou Breakfast Blend
Alternate View: $45 per month (1.5 bags per week) and $540 per year
Verdict: Wow. My wife and I have a coffee habit to the tune of nearly 50 bucks a month. That’s just a pot a day. Seems steep at first blush. But upon further review, it comes out to about 25 cents per cup.

Gas
Cost: $3.80 per gallon
Alternate View: 19 cents per mile (20 mpg) or $4.18 for my daily commute
Verdict: I’m not going to get into the geo-political and environmental debates about the true cost of gasoline, but it’s interesting to think about shelling out $4 to drive to work or $10.50 to visit my mom in Maple Grove.

I thought I’d go to my grave without ever learning the identity of Deep Throat, the mysterious source of inside information in the Watergate scandal. When former FBI official Mark Felt was revealed as Deep Throat a few years back, I was delighted to cross one mystery off my life’s list.

And thanks to a new marketing campaign by Gillette, I can now dispose of another: the lifespan of a razor blade.

Legend has it that the blade makers have never revealed the expected lifespan of a razor blade. I always figured they must have secret testing data showing that a blade would last for months and months. Since most men tend to replace their blades every couple of weeks, they’d miss out on a lot of sales if guys knew they could actually get longer life from a blade.

So I was surprised recently when I started seeing a commercial for Gillette’s new ProGlide razor. In it, a handsome young man travels the globe, having exciting, exotic experiences – all the while keeping clean with a single ProGlide blade cartridge.

The voiceover promises shavers “up to five weeks of comfortable shaves” with a single cartridge. (Although each cartridge contains no less than five blades – a phenomenon I wrote about here.)

So, it looks like five weeks has been established as the outer lifespan for the modern razor blade – at least, for men. Other than a one-time stunt in high school, I don’t know much about leg shaving, so I can’t vouch for the female side of the equation.

But one thing hasn’t changed – even though Gillette is broadcasting their blade’s lifespan on national TV, they still don’t seem eager to discuss it. A Gillette spokesman didn’t return my email seeking comment. That’s OK – I’m just happy to have the question settled once and for all.

Now, if someone could just let me know what happened to Amelia Earhart, D.B. Cooper and Jimmy Hoffa.

This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost.com.

The Wedge, a south Minneapolis institution since 1974.

Elizabeth Archerd first heard the doomsday predictions shortly after she began working at the Wedge, the south Minneapolis food cooperative.

“I started here in 1981, and I’ve been hearing about the impending death of co-ops since about 1982,” laughed Archerd, the Wedge’s membership and marketing coordinator. “First it was the mainstream grocery stories adding natural products – that was going to kill us.”

“Then Whole Foods came in, and that was going to be the death of co-ops. All it did was increase interest and awareness.”

The Wedge, which got its start in 1974 in the basement of an apartment building on Franklin Avenue, now has more than 15,000 members. The Lyndale Avenue store and its warehouse operation took in about $44 million last year, an increase of 7 percent over the previous year. The Wedge is one of 12 co-ops in the greater Twin Cities area — a group that continues to thrive even in the face of greatly increased competition in the grocery business over the last decade.

Archerd said the Wedge has been able to remain profitable even as it’s increased its community giving. The co-op’s major community giving program, WedgeShare, last year gave grants totaling more than $70,000 to community groups focused on sustainable living. The store also returned more than $1 million in patronage refunds to its members.

The Wedge supports Minnesota FoodShare, a monthlong statewide community giving program that provides almost half the annual food supply for 300 food shelves across Minnesota. Gov. Mark Dayton has declared March as Minnesota FoodShare Month.

Archerd says the Wedge doesn’t worry about increased competition from new grocery players like Trader Joe’s and Target.

“We didn’t start as marketing entities,” she said. “We were started by people who were not getting what they wanted from the business markets. So we’ve been listening to our customers from Day One, because our customers started us. We come up from our communities and we grew with our communities.”

“We call some of those other stores a gateway drug,” Archerd said. “Start at these other stores. When you’re ready for the real thing, come to the co-op.”

This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost.com.

Is it possible that prominent product placement in a network TV show can actually do more harm than good to a brand? The answer is “yes,” based on a few recent examples I’ve witnessed. And this comes from someone who believes that branded content is the future for marketers looking to reach consumers in the age of DVRs, On Demand, Hulu and Netflix.

The key to branded entertainment is the word “entertainment,” which advertisers too often forget. When it comes to TV product placement, marketers are spending more than ever and gaining more influence on the networks in the process. But when they insist on incorporating key messages instead of finding a clever, natural way to weave their brand into a storyline, it can be a startling disruption and a turnoff for viewers.

Subway gained a ton of negative attention last month for creating perhaps the most egregious example of all-time in an episode of “Hawaii Five-0.” Check out the characters interrupting the plot to banter about Subway for nearly a minute. I laughed out loud when I saw it, but sadly “Hawaii Five-0″ is not a comedy.

Subway is far from the only offender out there, however. In fact, if Subway is the current “bad product placement” champion, State Farm must be the number one contender for the title. In reading some YouTube comments about the Subway clip, I discovered this gem from “90210,” where the characters surf State Farm’s website for renter’s insurance. You’ve got to see this ham-handed attempt to believe it.

So what’s the key to successful brand integration into programming? Like any good marketing effort, it must be compelling and relevant. Rather than tightly controlling the key messages, marketers should demand that their brand is seamlessly worked into a scene in a creative way.

Consumers are willing to accept brands in their favorite shows. For me, it’s actually more realistic to see someone drinking a Coke rather than a Cola, shopping at Target instead of a generic mall, or even eating a Subway sandwich. If marketers give up some control and let the writers do their jobs, everyone will win. The networks will get their money without appearing to be sellouts and brands will engage consumers instead of insulting them.

This 1904 political cartoon depicts the business colossus of the day, Standard Oil, as a grasping octopus.

Only the wildest dreamers of earlier generations could have imagined the everyday wonders we take for granted in the digital age.

In our purses and in our pockets, we carry devices that are exponentially more powerful than the computer banks that once filled entire rooms. While standing in line at the bank or having a drink at the bar, we can instantly summon virtually any bit of knowledge that’s ever been created by the human mind.

We’re never lost. We never lack answers. We’re never out of touch, unless we choose to be. You can call it a blessing, or call it a curse – I call it both.

But we’re so enraptured by our digital devices, and how much easier they make our lives, that I think we’ve failed to notice how much control we’re ceding to a handful of increasingly powerful businesses.

In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, at the peak of the Industrial Revolution, dozens of U.S. industries were controlled by trusts that squeezed out competition for the benefit of that era’s “one percent.” The biggest trust of all, Standard Oil, made John D. Rockefeller Sr. the first billionaire.

I thought about the trust era as I read through “U.S. Digital Future in Focus,” an annual report on digital media issued by comScore Inc. Why? Because the major players in the new digital economy are attaining tremendous positions of dominance. For example:

• Google has 68% of the Internet’s search traffic
• YouTube (owned by Google) has half the Web’s video traffic
• Facebook controls 28% of the Web’s display advertising and accounts for 1 of every 7 minutes consumers spend online
• Android and Apple combined have more than 75 percent of the smartphone market

I understand why these companies have been able to attain such dominant positions. Simply put, they earned their success by building a better mousetrap.

And I also understand that things can change quickly in the digital economy. It’s easy to forget that Facebook didn’t launch until 2004 and YouTube until 2005. In 2003, pre-iPod and iPhone, you could have bought a share of Apple stock for about $7. That share today would cost you about $520.

Meanwhile, Blackberry maker Research in Motion has lost nearly 90 percent of its market value in the last three years. And the Palm Pilot, once a leader in personal digital technology, is extinct.

So, change is a given, and maybe we shouldn’t worry about the prospect of a few companies controlling the technology and social networks that we’ve all come to rely on as essential to the daily routines of life and work.

All I’m saying is, if we’re going to turn over the running of our lives to Apple, Facebook and Google, let’s at least be aware that we’re doing it.

This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost.com.