In middle school, we had an annual fund-raising event where the school tried to get all of the students to sell magazine subscriptions to friends and family. I guess the school got a cut of the proceeds, while some organization got the rest. They brought in a motivational speaker to get us pumped to win prizes for selling X number of magazines, “home” classes competed to see who could sell the most magazine subscriptions, and a lot of pressure was placed on students to sell. It was horrible.
Anyway, I had a badass history teacher who occasionally spent class lecturing us about life. We had a block schedule, so he’d usually get worked up for the first hour, then settle down and get through material in the second. Seriously, one of the best teachers I ever had. Anyway, toward the end of this once-per-year program, when kids were getting all their prizes, he really laid it down how stupid the whole thing was. Some kid had sold in the upper ranges of subscriptions and had won a little hand-crank paper shredder. It had already broken. I don’t remember everything my teacher said, but I remember this detail because he pointed it out. His point was: “Look, you spend all this time trying to sell crap, just so you could win something that you could have easily bought for $15 somewhere, and now what? What did you really accomplish for wasting all that time and energy?”
Legend.
Step one in conning people is to convince them that what you’re selling or “giving away” is worth more than it is. It’s usually either ignorance or distraction that leads us to go along with this, to actually believe the salesman’s value, when there is clearly a conflict of interest. Oh, I get that schools need to raise money sometimes, but as kids who didn’t know any better, we got hyped up over sticks of bubble gum that were three feet long (and nasty, I might add), finger-crank shredders, and oh I don’t what else there was. Cheap crap you could probably order from a catalog, or find on the far corners of Amazon. The subscriptions we were selling cost far more than the prizes we sought. Most frustrating is that the school knew we’d be begging family members who would buy to “help us out”, which is pandering, relying on sympathy, and you know how I feel about that. Being firmly crotchety in my 30s, I’d just give a $20 bill now and tell them to keep their magazines to themselves (think Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino). You can’t be legally obligated to sell anything, but the school made it sound like you had to sell at least one subscription. We were too young to know just how much doublespeak it took to make it feel mandatory. Jeez, just do a bake sale, you’ll make more money and people will have a better time.
But we see this everywhere: sign up and get this FREE! Buy this knife and get the letter opener FREE! Get a FREE digging tool with this metal detector! Since you bought this book, get a FREE second cookie when you buy the first cookie! (Oh Barnes and Noble, how the mighty have fallen!)
I’ve been seeing Nintendo Switch game “deals” lately, that aren’t deals at all, just the price of two games put together, or the price of a game and a controller combined and packaged together. Not even a $5 savings! I’m really loving my Switch console, but that stuff pisses me off.
Look, there are good marketers in the world. I think. But psychology is being leveraged against us every single day. And people don’t care! People are just cool getting hosed. People are cool with making bad money decisions. Why aren’t more people talking about this stuff? I’m like, “Really?! You’re just going to take it on the chin like that?!”
Even REI does this. They have twice a year sales, and since the stuff there is pretty expensive, you can get some really good deals. But of course, what they want is for you to find more than you were looking for, so they can manufacture additional demand. And I’ve done it. I’ve been snookered. I’ve spent hundreds more than intended before. And the older I get, the more skeptical I am, because sellers get clever, so caveat emptor. We love thinking we’ve gotten a real bargain, but so much of this is smoke and mirrors, mental gymnastics, delusions created by ourselves and others.
Constant vigilance! Don’t go for gimmicks!