Amish Adult Stores Go Franchise
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In a surprise move that has sent shock waves through the American Adult industry and unleashed a tsunami of speculation in wood futures on Wall Street, the popular Amish Adult Store chain today announced that it will sell franchises in an attempt to go nation-wide. |
Amish Adult Stores, already a household name in liberal Pennsylvania and Ohio, where erotic nostalgia has become big business, have carved a niche for themselves among today's affluent twenty-something urbanites with their stylish range of wooden sex toys and old-fashioned porn like grandma and grandpa used to enjoy. Utterpants
caught up with Amish Adult Stores franchise manager, Diane Zimmerman,
at the company's manufacturing plant in Strasburg, Pennsylvania. “I
can't tell you how excited I am," gushed the twenty-seven year-old
blonde as she showed us round the plant. "We never imagined that
there would be such a huge demand for our products." Diane went on to explain that young Amish girls learn the value of
working with their fingers at an early age and most of them know how
to handle wood before they're out of their teens, so it came as something
of a shock to the company when some customers complained they were being
injured by their sex toys. Although the bulk of the stores sales come from smaller products made
from oak and apple wood the company also manufactures larger toys, like
the powerful, 'EasyRide' range of rocking horses, shaking sheep and
gyrating goats. It's not that the Amish don’t employ machinery, they just limit their technology to inventions developed before 1890. Their machinery has gears, hand cranks, fulcrums; the full gamut of mechanical engineering development from Adam to post Eli Whitney. They just don’t use internal combustion engines or electricity. They have egg beaters, wind powered pumps, water mills and horse powered pile driver technology and this timeless knowledge has been carefully built into their hand-crafted sex toys down the generations. Diane admitted that much of their market is driven by nostalgia. "All across America people yearn for a simpler age of non-electric self-pleasure. Even when batteries were finally invented, who could afford them? And of course they're still weak and undependable, playing out on you at just the wrong time. Our Amish Adult Stores take people back to the moaning haylofts and outhouses of yesteryear, when backyards were filled with friendly farm animals, every boy had his favourite tree knot and little girls slid down wooden banisters." As one smiling artisan put it to us as he lovingly turned the cherry wood shaft for another deluxe twelve inch dildo, "Who needs a blowup doll when you can have a hand-cranked, shaking sheep—and who knows a sheep’s bottom better than we Amish lads?"Diane nodded approvingly, adding: "It's not just a nostalgia trip for our customers. Think about all those power outages in the big cities! Everybody gets a bit horny in a power outage, which explains why we Amish have so many kids, but what if you have no partner? With electric appliances you’re screwed—uh—well not screwed actually, anyway, you’re shit out of luck. But if you’ve been shopping in an Amish Adult Store, you’re only a couple of hand cranks away from the ride of your life.” A blanket ban on movies and TV has not prevented the enterprising Amish
manufacturing a lap top porno flip card player—imaginatively marketed
as the 'seXbox'. Comment on this story? Click the button to have your say. Story © Don Pitts 2005. Picture and construction © utterpants.co.uk /290405 |