22. Martha Stewart in the Middle

Less than a decade after Martha Stewart left prison, she was in court again. It was a three-way fight between Martha, Macy's, and JCPenney that could have played out in a middle school cafeteria. And the fight raised an intriguing question: What exactly is a store? PLUS: One listener tells us why Scrubbing Bubbles was banned from her home.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this episode misstated the current owner of bathroom cleaner Scrubbing Bubbles. It is S.C. Johnson & Son, not Johnson & Johnson.

Produced by Amy Pedulla, with Dan Bobkoff and Sarah Wyman.

Transcript

Note: This transcript may contain errors.

DAN BOBKOFF: I think like a lot of people, middle school was not the best time in my life. I wasn't always sure who really was a friend, and who wasn't. There was this one guy who would sometimes say something nice to my face and then the opposite behind my back. And you know how middle school is, lots of kids liked to test the rules and break them.

And all that came back to me when I was thinking about this drama we're about to tell you. Except - this is not a story about middle school. It's in a courtroom in New York City.

Our drama has three main characters.

The first: someone named Martha Stewart

ARCHIVAL: Good things are a signature of Martha Stewart living. They're those simple, clever shortcuts and solutions...

DB: Maybe you've heard of her?

Convicted felon.

ARCHIVAL: Along with the highs, incredible lows including prison time...

DB: Bud of bud-lover Snoop Dogg.

MARTHA STEWART: The potatoes have been boiled.
SNOOP DOGG: I've never done it with a machine.
MS: Well it's easy. How do you do it?
SD: Well, we in the hood, we ya ya ya ya!

DB: Our second player - Ron Johnson.

Famous for building Apple's stores. An energetic, enthusiastic, salesman….

The man who tried to turn JCPenney into something….hip?

ARCHIVAL: JC Penney CEO and the man who actually designed those Apple stores that are so popular now, Ron Johnson finally unveiling his plans to redesign the beleaguered JC Penney.

DB: And our last character: Terry Lundgren. Perfectly coiffed CEO of Macy's from 2003 to 2017. Looks like a catalog model. Spent his whole career in retail.

TERRY LUNDGREN: I've been doing this now for 13 and a half years, it'll be 14 by the time I turn over the CEO...

DB: These are the protagonists of a courtroom drama that played out in Manhattan in 2013.

It's Law and Order: Home Department.

From Business Insider and Stitcher, this is Household Name.

Brands you know, stories you don't. I'm Dan Bobkoff.

Today, the Martha Stewart trial.

ARCHIVAL: The ongoing investigation of Martha Stewart and allegations of insider trading.

No, not that one. This one.

ARCHIVAL: Alright, this could be decision day in the tug of war between two retail giants over their partnership with Martha Stewart.

This dramatic, funny trial between Martha Stewart, Macy's, and JCPenney.

It's a case that revealed the amazingly personal, catty, and backstabbing relationships between these three tycoons. It featured a virtuoso performance by Martha Stewart on the stand. And at its core: a question that you'd think would be easy to answer: what exactly is a store?

And later, why one listener was forbidden from using a certain bathroom cleaner, and how that changed her life. Seriously.

Stay with us.

ACT I

DB: I've been thinking about this trial since 2013… I was a business reporter for NPR then, and my editor sent me down to New York State Court to watch Martha Stewart take the stand in a contract dispute.

I couldn't get over how confident, relaxed, and… sarcastic she was as these two big companies waged war over her brand.

I was just in the courtroom for that one day. But Stephanie Clifford was there for weeks.

DB: Day in and day out.

STEPHANIE CLIFFORD: Day in and day out.

DB: A lot of drama.

SC: Yes.

DB: Stephanie is a journalist and novelist. She covered the trial for the New York Times.

SC: It was the first time I'd covered a trial and I walked in the first day and saw these like pithy, mean emails from Ron Johnson, the CEO of Penney's, that he wrote about Terry Lundgren, the CEO of Macy's, up on a screen and I was like, 'this is awesome. Like, I'm so glad to be here!'

DB: This, of course, was not the first time Martha Stewart was at the center of a high profile court case.

ARCHIVAL: Stewart was convicted on all four charges she faced. Conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and two counts of making false statements.

DB: And you could argue Martha would never have ended up in court with Macy's and JCPenney if it wasn't for that first case… Before that 2004 case…

SC: Martha is like a superstar. She's got a TV show. She's got her magazine she's selling books right and left, and then in 2001, she makes a stock trade.

DB: Martha's stockbroker had given her a tip that the pharmaceutical company ImClone didn't get FDA approval for a drug. She sold her stock before the news was public, and was accused of insider trading. In 2004, she was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and making false statements to a federal investigator.

After the trial, a stone faced Martha walked out of the courtroom and spoke to the cameras waiting for her outside.

MARTHA STEWART: More than 200 people have lost their jobs at my company.

DB: She was sentenced to five months in a minimum security prison.

MS: And I'll be back...I will be back.

DB: Martha got out, boarded a private plane,

MSNBC: There she is… Martha Stewart...waving to her fans.

DB: Was whisked home. She'd spend another five months on house arrest.

It's a low point for Martha Stewart the person and Martha Stewart the brand. She was no longer the CEO, and no longer the face of the magazine. And then, in the fall of 2005, Martha's sentence was up.

DB: So, okay so she gets out. And there's a big question mark over here at this moment. Right? There was a question about whether she could still be the face of something.

SC: Right. And how do you save face when she's been in prison?

DB: Martha began comeback tour. She published two books in two months. She expanded her existing collection at KMart. She hosted a new daytime talk show.

MS: So, it feels like spring. And it's so exciting. Because the garden started to grow, the peas came in on St. Patrick's Day, as they are supposed to...

She even gets her own spinoff of The Apprentice. Does anyone actually remember this?

MS: I'm looking for someone with big creative ideas, possibly even one idea. I'm looking for a team player...

DB: It does not get good ratings. But her magazine was recovering, and she was back on the cover.

This was a pretty good comeback for somebody who just spent five months in prison and had weathered a major PR disaster. But Martha wanted more. She didn't just want her brand to be where it had been a year ago—before her prison sentence. She wanted it to be better and bigger.

Terry Lundgren had a problem too. He was the CEO of Macy's, and his stores were facing competition from online retailers.

SC: So Terry Lundgren is this like born and bred retail exec. Like you would expect him to have been running a department store in the 1920s. Terry is old school, like, you know the halls of Macy's were like these paneled halls where he would meet you in a giant conference room with an oak table and it was with like portraits of various Macy's (laughs) like executives staring down at you.

DB: But in 2006, that era was winding to a close. Macy's was competing with retailers like Sears and J.C. Penney for middle-class customers.

Terry's job was to make sure Macy's won them over. To do that, he needed a big name, someone that could get shoppers into his stores and boost sales. He needed someone who was known for quality and class…

Someone like Martha Stewart.

So Terry and Martha struck a deal for Martha to bring her towels, dishes, ornaments and other home goods to Macy's….exclusively. Martha Stewart would develop a new line of products that could only be sold at Macy's — and no other stores.

When the deal was announced, stock in Martha's company soared 12%.

And Macy's—and Terry—were taking a calculated risk on her.

SC: Macy's did a lot of market research. They hired a public relations firm to look into what their customers who are middle Americans thought of Martha and the idea was that, they found, this is Terry Lundgren in a quote from, the trial, he says "Lots of people don't like her, but they like her products, and they will buy her products from Macy's."

DB: How big a risk was this for Macy's?

SC: Fairly big because they were making a huge bet on her. Macy's is not a company that does things lightly or without testing. Even so, had they brought these products in and they didn't sell, you're stuck with this inventory. It's exclusive to Macy's. You can't offload it at a discount retailer so they're really making a bet on Martha Stewart and they're really saying 'we believe you can come back and you're going to do it with us.'

DB: Martha quickly became a face of Macy's. The star of its ads.

MACY'S AD: Make it festive and inviting!

Check check! Look alive, people! Martha, this is your inner monologue.

Put the napkin down!

Ah, he's at it again!

DB: The public started to say Macy's and Martha in the same breath.

And through all this, Terry and Martha got to know each other better too.

SC: They become sort of corporate pals.

DB: They went to events and fundraisers together… they traveled to Haiti together after the earthquake.

SC: You know, she feels good hitting him up for favors like VIP tickets to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

DB: In 2008, Martha's company pointed to the Macy's deal as one of its bright spots.

But by 2012, she was starting to set her sights higher.

SC: Her sales are pretty solid at about 300 million but she's not that happy with it. She thinks Macy's can do more with her.

DAN: And then what happens?

STEPHANIE: And then enter: Ron Johnson.

DB: Macy's world is about to be turned upside down. And our story is about to get a lot more dramatic.

That's in a minute.

ACT II

DB: We're back.

By 2011, JCPenney was not in great shape. It was losing market share. And it was earning much less per square foot than Macy's. It also kind of lost its identity. It wasn't giving shoppers a good reason to go Penney's rather than a discount store.

Which brings us to our third player in this drama.

DB: Who's Ron Johnson?

SC: So Ron Johnson comes from the West.

DB: If Terry Lundgren was born and bred to run department stores, Ron Johnson was built to turn them upside down.

SC: He started at Target which, in the '90s, which was very forward-thinking then and very hip.

DB: Then, he went to Apple.

SC: He used to say he came up with the idea of the Apple stores and he engineered that. People at Apple, some have different opinions on that.

DB: And when he came to JC Penney in 2011, Ron Johnson had big plans. He wanted to turn the company into something it frankly wasn't. Bright and hip and… sort of fancy.

SC: He's trying to take JCPenney more upscale. He begins ordering slim fitting, you know, European men's suits and things like that for Penney's customer who prefers kind of more generous sizing but Johnson is determined to kind of Apple store-ify it.

DB: Ron set about to do an expensive redesign, making JC Penney look like a collection of boutiques. It got a new stylized logo that just said JCP. And he did things that angered its customer base like ditching sales and discounts.

SC: He's full of energy, full of perfectionism. I remember one, at his big conference introducing his new ideas for Penny, I heard from a source that the day before he came in to check that the chairs were alright, and then he decided they weren't and reordered like wedding banquet chairs

DB: That sounds like a Steve Jobs move.

SC: IT IS and I think he was trying to emulate Jobs.

DB: But there was one more important part to Ron's plan: Like Terry Lundgren, Ron wanted to attach JC Penney's name to another brand. And like Terry before him, Ron wanted Martha.

SC: He decides that Martha Stewart is going to be the biggest seller that JCPenney can have. And so he goes after Martha hard.

DB: But Martha's tied up, she has another deal.

SC: Yeah, but Martha and Johnson both want to get out of that deal, or not get out of that deal, but essentially have a competing deal at Penny. So Johnson flies out east to meet Martha to you know to go to her showroom. He does a tour of her headquarters. He loves it. She takes him out for coffee at her favorite Upper East Side spot where she discovers he doesn't drink coffee...

DB: Is that a big deal? Is that like a… moment?

SC: I think so. I think they're both kind of courting each other… It's like these slightly awkward first dates.

DB: Macy's may have had an exclusive deal. But that didn't stop Ron. And he definitely didn't let on that he was trying to steal Martha away from Macy's and Terry.

SC: He knows Terry. And he's, publicly, he's very deferential to Terry. He'll send him these, you know gentlemanly emails saying like 'congratulations on this 'and right back, you know, after after Johnson does his first big Wall Street presentation Lundgren writes to say 'that sounded great! Congratulations' and Ron writes back saying something like 'thank you so much. I respect you inordinately.' Meanwhile behind the scenes. He is working to slap Macy's in the face.

DB: In December 2011, Ron and Martha made a deal. And they made that deal public. JC Penney would pay a little over $38 million for a stake in the company. And JCP would get a couple seats on Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia's board. The deal was to last 10 years. And the deal would bring Martha's home goods into JC Penney stores.

The same day they announced the deal, Martha called Terry to break the news to him.

He hung up on her.

RON JOHNSON: People don't realize that when this store was founded in 1902, the name of the store was The Golden Rule. You know, do unto others—

FOX: Wow. That was actually the name of the store.

RJ: For the first decade. And then it became JCPenney…

DB: This is Ron Johnson on Fox Business shortly after the Martha deal was announced. He's gesticulating a lot in this video. He looks really confident.

SC: I think they genuinely thought Macy's wouldn't challenge it because--

DB: Why? That seems so naive.

SC: It does seem naive but Johnson at the time was so full of hubris. He thought he was coming in to this staid industry. He was going to shake it up, and when you see some of his emails once this deal is announced, you see that his he believes Terry's going to back down, Terry Lundgren, because it's Penny's on the offensive. You know, Terry doesn't know what to do. And of course what Terry does is is sue…

FOX: Martha Stewart Living… got a little road bump there because of Macy's trying to sue, and saying that they had an exclusive with Martha Stewart. But she was here today.

RJ: Yeah, Martha was here.

FOX: What's the latest on that?

RJ: I haven't seen a road bump… we're pursuing full on board to create these Martha Stewart stores...

DB: It was a road bump. A court temporarily barred JCPenney from selling Martha products until the case was resolved. But Martha and Ron remained confident. They thought they found a loophole.

SC: There is a carve-out in the Macy's contract for Martha's own stores, which he didn't have at that point.

DB: What does that mean exactly?

SC: That she is allowed to sell these home products if she ever starts her own stores. So the signage would be designed by a company, but it would be Penney getting the sales credit, Penney employees working in the store.

DB: To Macy's, Martha and JCPenney were clearly violating the contract. To JCPenney, this wasn't a department store selling Martha's goods. It was Martha opening her OWN store inside a JCPenney. ...Totally different!

SC: Right. So the idea is you'd walk into a store that says JCPenney and maybe off to the left you're going to see this pretty area. I would say like white walls, colorful enamel cookware. You'll see the Martha Stewart sign. The idea is these like little jewel boxes of stores devoted to a single designer where the designer controls the look of the store, the feel of the store, except you're actually at a JC Penney and your receipt says JCPenney when you buy something.

DB: So Ron Johnson's arguments, or these lawyers have found what they think is this amazing loophole that 'oh, if we just call it a store. It's totally different than what Macy's is doing!'

SC: Right then, it's Martha's own store, even though it's right inside of a JC Penney.

DB: Does anyone actually buy that outside of JCPenney?

SC: Well, no. (laughs)

DB: Macy's didn't just sue JCPenney. It sued Martha's company too. And it all came to a head in one New York courtroom.

ARCHIVAL: This is turning into a bitter courtroom battle between arch rivals, and old friends.

DB: After the break...the trial. What's in store for Martha and JCPenney… and what IS a store anyway?

ACT III

DB: We're back.

In February 2013, the feud between Martha, Terry, and Ron went to trial.

SC: So the civil courthouse in Manhattan is that Courthouse you see on order with those tall columns and you walk up the marble steps and then you go through security. And it was one of my first times in a courthouse... you go back to this beautiful courtroom. We were all kind of like passing back and forth lifesavers, and when we'd hear a good bit, we'd be like 'huh!' and elbow one another.

DB: This wasn't a jury trial. It'd be up to Justice Jeffrey Oing to rule. Which is kind of surprising! These cases typically end in settlement.

SC: Before before the trial started Penney and Martha Stewart were willing to do mediation, and Macy's wouldn't they wanted to bring this to a trial.

DB: Terry was livid.

SC: Terry was mad and Terry wanted to get, to get both of them.

DB: The courtroom was packed with journalists.

SC: Justice Oing, who's the justice overseeing this from the state supreme court, is sitting up on a little kind of podium in his black robes. You've got the witness box to a side and that's where Martha Stewart's going to said. That's where Ron Johnson is going to sit. You've got these kind of pews which is where the reporters sit, and then you've got these crowds of lawyers because each company has a corporate law firm with like very expensive lawyers who are working incredibly hard (laughs) this particular lawsuit.

DB: I remember those lawyers. There were lots of them, combing frantically through stacks and stacks of papers. The whole thing felt and looked dramatic, like a movie reenactment of a court case.

But when Terry Lundgren took the stand, the atmosphere in the courtroom changed. Suddenly, it felt less like we were watching a court case, you know, with adults and companies and business disagreements. It was clear, to Terry Lundgren, this was personal.

SC: Totally personal. He testifies that he thought he and Martha were friends and that he thought he and Johnson were friends, and that this just cut him that Martha would even think of going to Penney.

DB: Terry Lundgren's a little emotional. He testified about how he found out about Martha's deal with JCPenney. He told the story about how he hung up on her when she called him.

SC: He testifies, 'I was completely shocked and Blown Away by what she was saying to me. It was so far from anything that I could ever imagine. It was I was in complete shock and I was totally disappointed' and he said, he couldn't comprehend this because Penney's is a direct competitor to Macy's is in his mind, this is such a betrayal that his his gal Martha would jump ship to Penney's and he says he felt sick and he'd never hung up on anybody in his life and he hung up on her.

DB: But that's just the beginning. Ron Johnson's emails were entered as evidence. They were projected on a giant screen in the courtroom for everyone to read. And, let me tell you, they were something else.

SC: One says one exec emails him 'Sounds like Macy is this pretty unhappy with the Martha deal' and does a sad emoji.

DB: By the way that this is like interoffice email between like very high level people and there's like like an unhappy face emoji...

SC: He loves it. He loves to see Terry squirming. He writes 'we put Terry in a corner.' Johnson writes 'Terry might have a headache tonight.' And then he writes to one of his executives 'wait until January 24th,' which is his big presentation about Penney's new plans, 'it will be a full-on migraine.' And the executive writes back. 'I think Terry is more likely to raise past migraine and to grand mal seizure.'

DB: Ha ha.

SC: Ha ha ha… But later, the judge when he's writing his decision about the Penney's/ Macy's dispute, he writes like 'these executives are so absurd. And clearly they were acting in bad faith.'

DB: This this like really goes to my theory that adult life is really the same as middle school.

SC: It is! and like imagine all of this happening in middle school, right and you're like arguing over Martha Stewart and Terry and Johnson like and your pals are like, 'yeah, he's got a migraine like yeah, it's a seizure'

DB: and it almost feels like, you know, people are gossiping like, 'oh my it's like I saw Martha hanging out with JC Penney.'

SC: 'You think something's going on?'

DB: 'Are they cheating?'

SC: The answer is yes!

DB: The trial went on like this for weeks. Lots of he-said, he-said from Ron and Terry. Those emails. And then, in March 2013, Martha Stewart took the stand.

SC: It was very exciting the day that that she came to testify.

ARCHIVAL: How do you think the lawyers are going to grill her today what are they going to try to get out of her?

Well Martha Stewart on the stand today is the defining moment of this case...she is in the eye of the storm….

DB: My friend has this phrase called the power slouch and this is this one of those things you sort of know it when you see it someone who is so in command and so comfortable in their own skin and almost seem like they just want to shoot from the hip that they lean back and just sort of say whatever comes into their mind because they know that they're the most important person in the room. And that to me was Martha Stewart on the stand that day.

SC: Yeah, and let's be clear that the witness box is like one of the most intimidating places to sit in the world. There's a judge, there's this throng of people looking at you. Everything you say is being recorded and as we have seen like the tiniest word can make a difference and she doesn't care!

DB: When Martha's own lawyer asked her questions, she was cooperative. She even cracked jokes. Like, at this one point, she was asked how she split her time between her businesses….

SC: And she said 'I did my time' and everybody laughed.

DB: But when Macy's lawyer questioned her, she wouldn't even look at him.

SC: She just would stare above his head and give these very plain boring answers but like and he was a good lawyer, but he couldn't get her to like engage with him at all. She was just so cold and it was an amazing performance.

DB: There is this one moment from this trial that stayed with me for all these years. Macy's lawyer was questioning Martha, and she said something about bringing colorful cotton towels to KMart. Completely deadpan and without shame, she said she'd heard poor people don't do their laundry as often as rich people, so they don't want light-colored towels.

SC: And later on when Macy's lawyer was pressing, her he was trying to get her to say that Penney's and, and Macy's would be competing and he was like 'well if you bought a knife in a department store at one end of a mall, you wouldn't go to the other end of the mall and buy another knife' and she was 'like you could…' and then he pressed her again. And she was like 'you might have two houses! You might have two kitchens!'

DB: (laughs) That's how she shops.

SC: I know. Double the knives!

DB: Martha gave the impression that this trial was just a waste of her time. This was a contract dispute. Why couldn't they settle all this out of court? Out of the public eye?

SC: Like 'why are we all here?' She's above all that. She felt that the store within a store was, or she said she felt that that was a Martha Stewart store and therefore she was allowed to do what she wanted.

DB: And all this time, all this effort, all this money going to lawyers, all this embarrassment… all of it came down to one line in one contract, which raised a question: What. Is. A. Store?

SC: It sounds silly to, to a regular person to say like 'of course I know what a store is,' but so much of law is centered around these very precise definitions and questions. And if Macy's when they wrote up the contract wasn't thinking about store within a store and didn't put - 'stores within a store are not allowed,' then you get into this world where Penney's says 'ah! I see a way in!'

DB: What is a store? It's such a deceptive question. I tried to come up with a definition in my head… like a place you go to buy things. Maybe four walls, door, cash register, big sign out front. But then I thought… 'oh wait, there's online shopping. Amazon is a store. What about a vending machine. Is that a store? Or a stall on a street? Store?'

Martha Stewart's contract with Macy's said she specifically couldn't sell her homewares in other stores, but she could sell them if she opened a store of her own.

A Martha Stewart store.

So, here's the question Justice Oing had to answer: If JCPenney starts putting up walls inside its stores, hangs a big sign on them that says "Martha Stewart"… and you walk through a door… are you in JCPenney or are you in a Martha Stewart store that just happens to be located inside a department store?

SC: That's where courts get those very detailed and very interesting because they had all this testimony about like, you know, how is how would the store work? And what does it look like and who's putting in the installations and all of these kind of tiny factors that they were hoping would sway the judge one way or the other.

DB: During the trial, the lawyers obsessed over this question. And - it got heated.

SC: When one of Penney's lawyers was arguing to the judge about a store within a store, he said 'the definition of retail store is so ambiguous. The definition that Macy's lawyers wrote stinks.'

DB: To my mind, what's a really a stake here is JC Penney versus Macy's. So what did Martha have at stake here?

SC: I think she was beginning to have real doubts about Ron Johnson's whole vision. By then it was clear that the turnaround was not going to go as successfully as Johnson had promised her, you know a year and a handful of months before. And in fact later that year, Martha Stewart essentially backtracks. In October, she in a Martha Stewart Living filing they say that Penney is only going to sell Martha Stewart products in non-exclusive categories like windows and lighting and rugs and they won't do branded or unbranded stuff in the exclusive categories. So that's just a huge admission that this whole thing was sort of pointless.

DB: Pointless or not, the trial carried on for months.

In June 2014, a year after the suit first went to court, Justice Oing finally issued a ruling…against J.C. Penney.

Two years after that, he ordered J.C. Penney to pay Macy's about $3.5 million in damages.

Both companies then appeal the ruling.

And his drama doesn't come to an end until February 2017, four years after it went to trial. Finally, Macy's is ready to settle with J.C. Penney. They reach an undisclosed agreement.

But at this point, all the main characters have moved on.

Ron Johnson was ousted from JCPenney in 2013, while the trial was still in full-swing.

His attempt to Apple-ify JCPenney was a total bust. In his last year on the job, the company lost $4 billion in revenue.

These days, Ron's running a Silicon valley startup.

Terry Lundgren stayed at Macy's for a total of 14 years. He stepped down as CEO in 2017, just after Macy's and JC Penney finally reached their settlement, and he retired from his position as executive chairman the year after that.

He's now an executive in residence at Columbia Business School.

As for Martha… well, Martha's doing just fine.

Her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, was bought up by a conglomerate in 2015, years before JCPenney and Macy's finally reached their settlement.

And now, she spends a lot of time... hanging out with Snoop Dogg

MS: I'm eating European-style.

SD: Notice you've got different levels of eatery, that's what you've got to understand. Notice I'm only using one utensil.

DB: Sure, nobody's fighting over her brand in court anymore, but hey, we're still talking about her.

It's time now for Product Misplacement. Every now and then, we bring you stories about interesting ways a brand has played a role in your life. A lot of you have been writing in lately. Thank you for all your comments and stories. We've really been enjoying them. One listener actually told us that her cat ate a strap from one of her Crocs…. If you aren't in on that joke, you might want to go back and listen to last week's episode.

But this next Product Misplacement story comes from another listener.

KRISTI SALONEN: I'm Kristi Salonen, I currently live in Denali National Park in Alaska, but I'm originally from Utah.

DB: And the brand that's had an effect on her life?

KS: It's scrubbing bubbles! The bathroom cleaner.

DB: That's because in her house growing up, it was banned. Forbidden. Kristi told producer Sarah Wyman that this became an issue when she was around 6.

KS: And it was spurred by the commercial….

SCRUBBING BUBBLES AD: Alright, bubbles! Get ready to hit the dirt!

KS: It was really fun, it was these bubbles that ran around the bathroom, and…

SCRUBBING BUBBLES AD: We're gonna give this bathroom the shine of its life!

KS: I just wanted… it just looked like so much fun, and my mom was like 'well that's not coming in our house! That's made by Dow Chemical. They made Napalm during Vietnam!'

SCRUBBING BUBBLES AD: Let's go down the drain together! We work hard! So you don't have to!

KS: And then I was like 'oh, okay…' not knowing what any of that meant.

ARCHIVAL: The Dow Company began making Napalm in 1965.

KS: I remember telling somebody at a grocery store, I much have purchased it, or picked it up, or my mom made me take it back. And I remember just handing it to somebody and being like 'they made Napalm in Vietnam, so I need to get Comet instead?' I have a very vivid memory of like handing this to the poor guy who was at the grocery store across the street. So…

SARAH WYMAN: And neither of you totally understanding why this exchange was happening.

KS: No…no. Even in high school, I had a friend, you know, the cute boy that comes over to your house when you're in high school, and he said his aunt was an executive at Dow Chemical, and I just like… 'shut your mouth! Shut your mouth! It's never gonna happen!' And my mom's like 'Oh? Does she know what she does for a living? Really? Hmmmmm.'

As I got older, like my first apartment, you know my first house, she… I remember her coming to my house and looking in my cupboards to see if I had Scrubbing Bubbles. And I'm not gonna lie, I was about 25, I bought scrubbing bubbles as a revolt. I wanted to see what these bubbles could do. And I used it, and I got it in my eye. And it stung. It stung for 30 seconds while I rinsed it, but during those 30 seconds all that was going through my head was 'I'm going to go blind, and I'm going to have to tell my mom it's because of Scrubbing Bubbles.' That's the only thought that would go through my head. (laughs)

SW: In 1997, Dow sold Scrubbing Bubbles to S.C. Johnson & Son.

KS: And I didn't know that until a few years ago, and at the time, my mom was going through chemo. It didn't look good, and I was like 'mom, can I please…. Can I please use scrubbing bubbles now? Like, it's owned by Johnson and Johnson, the war was 40 years ago, you go to Hobby Lobby, can I please use scrubbing bubbles?' And my mom, at first she joked… my mom was Buddhist and she had a strong belief that she would be reincarnated… she told me she would be reincarnated to something that would disturb my usage of Scrubbing Bubbles, but I can't not walk through a cleaning aisle without a smirk at the Scrubbing Bubbles staring at me.

SW: It's like she's saying hello. (laughs)

KS: It is. It's like she got reincarnated as a can of Scrubbing Bubbles!

SW: Don't you dare take me off the shelf!

KS: (laughs) I think now it's almost a matter of closeness to her, now that she's gone. Like because I can't see a can of Scrubbing Bubbles without thinking of my mom.

It works really well, I don't know if you've tried it. I've only tried it a couple of times. Sorry mom!

CREDITS

DB: That's Kristi Salonen. If you have Product Misplacement story, send us an email at householdname@insider.com or let us know in our Facebook group, Household Name Podcast.

This episode was produced by Amy Pedulla, with Sarah Wyman and me.

Sound design by John DeLore and Casey Holford.

The executive producers of Household Name are Chris Bannon, Jenny Radelet and me.

Household Name is a production of Insider Audio.