I loooooooove her soooo...
And sheeeee must kno-oo-oow!
The way that I show her--
--(Shaw's)--
Has got to go straight to her heart!
[bass kick]
Straight to the heart,
Shaw's Jewelers! (ohhh-ohh-ohhh)

If you live in DC and listen to the radio, you have no doubt been serenaded by the above song hundreds of times. In fact, (especially if you listen to the ABC radio affiliate, WMAL), you hear a lot of jewelry advertisements on DC radio for some reason, at least one per commercial break. Surely there's some demographic motivation behind this, but my local radio advertisements are heavily populated by ads from pharmaceutical companies (old people?), Jerry's Subs and Pizza (where owner and proprietor Jerry actually hires celebrity impersonators and writes horrible, skits starring him, to advertise his food), mattress companies, and jewelry stores. There are two notable such stores with annoying theme songs, the other being "Jared, the Galleria of Jewelry," whose theme song repeats "That's Jared!" while the announcer talks about the local chain, and after some thematic key changes and saxophone licks, ends with a resounding, "It can only be Jared!"

Of course, while I can claim to be annoyed by these songs all I want, unfortunately, in the end it all comes down to the simple fact that advertising works for a reason: humans are fucking robots, and there are people who specialize in the art of knowing exactly what buttons to push to make us remember things. Whether or not I HATE Shaw's Jewelers and Jared, the Galleria of Jewelry, the advertising is effective simply because I remember the name (bad attention is better than no attention). Even worse, I remember the whole song, and for some unholy reason I have a preternatural ability to imitate the exact sound of the Shaw's Jeweler theme song singer's voice, and hence it is often stuck in my head.

At the beginning of the summer, when I was in the 1000 Islands in Ontario with my friends Al and Ethan, I was involved in some of the most thunderously masculine pursuits possible:

Chopping wood with an axe [Al]	Smoking cigars [Ethan]
Building big fires [All of us]	Having mustaches [Me]

Unfortunately, that all came to a crashing halt every time I absent-mindedly started singing out loud in a high pitched feminine croon, "I loooooooove her soooo!" Usually I was unable to arrest my vocal chords from singing the entire song unless I was interrupted. This went on for a day or two until Ethan stopped me and asked, "Wait. Are you singing the Belden Jeweler theme song?" I said, "No, I'm singing the Shaw's Jewelers theme song." "Right, but you're just changing the Belden Jeweler theme song to Shaw's because that's your last name, right?" "No, I am seriously singing the exact commercial that I hear on the radio every day about 50 times." "Dude, that's the same as the Belden's Jewelers song, I hear that every day in my car, too."

Holy shit.

There is more than one store with this exact theme song? Of course, they must be related. But how many more are there? After some research, the answer: (at least) 9. Below are copies of the storefront photos for all of these places, taken from the stores' websites (click the names to see the websites).

The Midwest	New England and Kansas (?)
Wisconsin	Minnesota
Metro DC area and a few on Western Lake Michigan	The West Coast
The South	Northern Midwest
Washington and Oregon

I don't have a problem with capitalism in general and companies forming chains that creep across the globe like ivy vines, but for some reason the identical websites for these branches freak me out. First of all, they are all poorly made. Not that I am in a position to judge, since I am no professional, but these websites were all constructed in minutes and are identical, except for the logos on the stores. Go ahead, click on every one of those links above. In the large versions of the pictures, it is also clear that the storefronts themselves are not real--they are all probably photoshopped from one original fake storefront. Just plain cheap.

To top it off, while visiting my girlfriend in Connecticut this weekend, we went to a local mall, and I saw, in person, for the first time, a real live Belden Jewelers store. Of course it looked nothing like the picture from the website, but beyond that, it was terribly cheap-looking, with bleached white walls and blinding fluorescent lights, none of which made the gold/gold-plating on the display items look any nicer. After that trip, I had Belden on the brain again, and when I returned to College Park, I went back to the Internet for more research.

It turns out that the other two most annoying theme songs on the radio and TV, the aforementioned "That's Jared!", and the more often TV-played, "Every kiss begins with Kay!" apparently come from the same sick minds that brought you "Straight to the heart." Indeed, Kay Jewelers, Jared the Galleria of Jewelry, and the assorted "local" branches pictured above, are all owned and operated by marketeer conglomerate Signet Group PLC.

Kay Jewelers, if you're not familiar, occupies the creepiest corner of every local mall, and specializes in wacky gimick jewelry, like "the three stone diamond necklace" that is supposed to symbolize everlasting love, or "telling her your still do," or some such crap. It always seemed like the kind of place that no person with a head on their shoulders would go into... and now that I know that Kay is affiliated with Shaw's Jewelers and That's Jared!, I am quite sure that Kay is no place to spend your money.

Some further research yielded the following information: apparently, Signet Group is a new name, adopted in 1994, for Ratner's Jewellery, a British jeweler that went bankrupt after Ratner himself made a speech at a company board meeting containing the following quote:

People say, "How can you sell this for such a low price?" I say, because it's total crap.... [Our earrings are] cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich but probably wouldn't last as long."

After that, Ratner's Jewellery went bankrupt, Ratner was fired, and in order to escape the stigma of his name after his speech was broadcast all over British news, they renamed themselved Signet Group three years later.

From there? It was straight to the heart.

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