Too Complicated For Me

If you were to ask anyone who studies human behavior – which is all Management scholars really do, when you get down to cases – they will tell you that human motivations are one of the hardest things to definitively identify. You can ask people why they did something, and it is possible that you might an honest answer, but once you start allowing for confirmation bias, self-deception, rationalization, different interpretations of behavioral and cultural standards, and sheer pigheaded stubbornness, just to name a few, it’s not always clear if the people in question even know why they did things. The question of whether humans are rational or rationalizing goes back at least three centuries, and probably for as long as people have been people, and that doesn’t even consider ignorance, bigotry, or outright stupidity…

Take, for example, the actions of a non-profit group calling itself The American Bible Society (hereinafter ABS). The organization has been in operation since 1816, fulfilling the mission of translating the Bible into various languages and distributing copies around the world, so that people who don’t speak English, Latin, or Aramaic can read the Christian scripture for themselves. The ABS has had a core values statement stressing generally laudable principles like integrity which it has asked employees to sign for some years, but the statement wasn’t specifically Christian and failing to sign it wasn’t a termination offense. All of that appears to have changed this year, however…

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, the ABS has a new policy that they call the “Affirmation of Biblical Community” that, among other things, forbids pre-marital and extra-marital sex, and defines marriage as being limited to one man and one woman. The organization is requiring all of its personnel to sign the new policy statement, and presumably abide by its provisions, or resign from the ABS by the end of calendar 2018. This would effectively prohibit anyone who lives with a partner to whom they are not married, and anyone in a same-sex marriage, from working for the ABS. Whether it would also cause any such people to become alienated from the organization, consider its leadership to be a bunch of small-minded homophobic bigots, or prevent the ABS from operating as effectively is yet to be determined, but according to the Inquirer a number of core personnel have already resigned their posts…

Whether or not this will bring the ABS into conflict with any Federal or state anti-discrimination laws remains to be seen, although it is worth noting that Philadelphia itself has a law that forbids discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation. There are exceptions in the law for non-profits and religious groups, and the ABS might be able to argue in court that they need such a requirement for reasons that escape me at the moment. What I find even more bizarre and inexplicable is what the leadership of the group thinks that such a prohibition – and the resulting alienation, distain, and anger – will do to improve their operations or help them to accomplish their mission…

The president and CEO of the group is quoted in the Inquirer story as saying that this new policy will bring “unity and clarity” to the ABS because it will ensure that their staff has a “deep and personal connection to the Bible.” I’m not sure why they believe that such a connection is necessary in order to translate text into different languages or handle the logistics of getting hard copies of the documents to people around the world who (presumably) want to read them; I’m also not clear on why they think traits like intolerance and bigotry are appropriate to a (supposedly) Christian religious mission. But even if there is any merit in those positions, I still believe that the ABS leadership has their priorities backwards…

As I have noted in posts about for-profit companies with mandatory religious requirements, it might be pleasant for the ABS personnel to work surrounded by other Christian zealots; it might also prevent anyone who works there from questioning the bigotry and intolerance being perpetuated by their leadership. But the purpose of this agency isn’t to reinforce the beliefs of existing Christian zealots or contribute to their upkeep; it is to bring the scripture as they see it to people who do not currently have access to the texts and may not even be Christians at this time. I have to ask, once again, if it wouldn’t make more sense to do good works for people and tell anyone who asks that “I do these things for you because my faith demands it” than to imply than anyone who isn’t an intolerant religious bigot is unwelcome in your ministry?

I’ve spent most of my life watching people, and most of the last three decades studying them, but I still find this sort of behavior baffling in anyone, let alone adherents of a faith that teaches acceptance, love, and universal equality as children of the same creator. Maybe this contradiction makes sense to someone, somewhere, but despite my best efforts it’s still too complicated for me…

This is Free Speech?

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t like Yelp very much, as you may have noticed from previous posts in this space about the company. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with providing an online location for people to record their frustrations about various companies with whom they have done business, but the company’s occasional attempts to strong-arm small business owners for money (in order to avoid negative reviews) annoy me, and the fact that they have become a haven for trolls, enemies, hysterics, and blackmailers has eroded both my respect for the company and my patience with the people who post there. But as outrageous as I find fake reviews made for the purpose of damaging persons or organizations, whether for extortion or just for the fun of random destruction, I have to admit that suing people over truthful reviews because you don’t like what was said may be even worse…

Consider, if you will, a case appearing in the New York Post this week about a woman who had an experience with a doctor’s practice that was so bad she felt compelled to leave negative reviews on Yelp and two more specialized review sites telling other potential patients to steer clear. No one on either side has claimed that she did so in order to extort money (or anything else) from the doctor or the practice, but they are claiming that the reviews are a baseless attempt to make the doctor and/or the practice look bad. In suing the woman who left the reviews, the plaintiff’s attorneys have stated that the doctor is a highly qualified practitioner with the best possible training and therefore couldn’t possibly have committed the annoying and possibly fraudulent acts the defendant’s reviews describe…

Now, we should probably acknowledge that neither you nor I were present during these events, so we couldn’t really draw any conclusions about the case even if we both had law degrees. It is entirely possible that, as the doctor’s attorneys are claiming, there is no truth to these allegations, and the reviews were made entirely by the defendant out of personal animus. It is equally possible, however, that all of the things in the reviews are accurate, and the plaintiff in this case is using his greater financial resources to attempt to silence a disgruntled former patient. What is not in dispute by either party is that the defendant has already had to scrape together in excess of $20,000 in legal fees to defend herself against a suit that has not even gone to court yet…

If it turns out that the defendant was telling the truth all along it is possible that the court will rule in her favor, but that won’t be much comfort if she ends up losing the start-up business she has been developing and going bankrupt trying to pay her legal fees. On the other hand, if the claims made in the reviews were baseless, the doctor is entirely within his rights to sue to recover the damages those reviews have cost his business, although I am skeptical as to whether those are really in the million-dollar range. What seems obvious to me is that, regardless of the merits of this case, there is almost certainly a non-zero percentage of the negative reviews on Yelp that do have a factual basis – and in such cases, even if the person leaving the negative reviews has hard evidence that supports their comments, there is a real chance of their life being ruined by a punitive lawsuit…

One could also argue that I’m being unfair in blaming the people at Yelp for any of this, I suppose. The truth is that in an increasingly interconnected age, everyone needs to be more careful about what they say in public, and that includes things they post on a public website. Blaming Yelp for cases like this one could be compared to blaming the owners of a bar for the damage done in a fight that breaks out there. But I would also point out that there is a reason why bars have bouncers, why bartenders are allowed to cut belligerent drunks off before they get too obstreperous, why troublemakers can be (politely) asked to leave before anyone gets hurt…

And there is also a reason why you should be careful who you pick a fight with in a bar, no matter how good an idea it might have seemed at the time…

The Ethics of Gun Sales

Here’s another hypothetical for you: Suppose for a moment that you own a retail business, and the child of one of your customers uses something that his/her parent purchased from you to commit a heinous crime. Let us also suppose that the product you sold in entirely legal in your city, county, and state, that ownership of such articles is (debatably) protected by Federal law, and that you have complied with or exceeded the requirements of every law and ordinance that regulates these purchases and your class of business. Let us further suppose that your customer took all measures required by law and all of the measures that a reasonably prudent person would take to secure the article he/she purchased from you, and that their child defeated those measures and precautions in order to get access to the article. What degree of responsibility do you still have for the resulting heinous crime?

Before you answer that, consider what your opinion would be if you owned the company that had manufactured the article used in the aforementioned heinous crime. Suppose that your product was legal to produce in the United States, that you were in full compliance with all state and Federal laws regarding the production, distribution, and sale of your products, and that the heinous crime in question was committed by a person unknown to you in a location hundreds or thousands of miles from any facility that you own. What degree of responsibility would you and/or your company have for the heinous crime mentioned above?

As you’ve probably guessed, there is such a case currently before the courts following the Santa Fe Texas School shooting, as the families of some of the victims have brought suit against the gun store that sold the guns used in the shootings, and the companies that manufactured them. People who identify as pro-gun and/or libertarian are calling these actions absurd, and are comparing them to the lawsuits filed against food companies for making the plaintiffs obese. People who identify as in favor of gun control and/or victim’s rights have responded by saying that if you’re going to manufacture and/or sell devices that make it remarkably easy for a single deranged individual to injure or kill a great many other people in a short period of time, you’re going to have to expect to be held responsible when exactly that happens…

As an amateur historian I actually do have some knowledge of both the inclusion of the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights and the ways it has been interpreted in modern times, but I’m not going to offer opinions about Constitutional Law without a license. The legal exposure (or lack of it) that these companies might have in this case is up to the court system, not scruffy business bloggers. For now let’s stick to the issue at hand: what ethical responsibility do the people who make and sell guns have for atrocities committed by their customers?

On the one hand, one could argue that any customer could conceivably use any tangible object to commit a crime, regardless of whether or not that object is normally considered to be a weapon. Nothing else appearing, a customer could use the objects you have sold them to stab, bludgeon, or smother their victim, and the number of things that can be used to poison an adult human being are appalling once you start to enumerate them. On the other hand, guns generally have no practical function other than launching small quantities of lead into targets at extremely high velocities. Guns do not, in fact, kill people. They do, however, make it far too easy for people who have one to kill other people. And while there are some people who do have a legitimate need for a gun, decades of historical data covering millions of incidents very clearly establishes that the odds of being killed in a gun mishap (or a gun-related suicide) are several hundred times more likely than the odds of defending one’s self or one’s family with a personal weapon…

All of which brings me to the question: Do we, as business people, have an ethical responsibility to prevent customers from purchasing consumer products that could be used to injure or kill another person, either by them or by someone who has stolen the products? Alternately, do we have the right to tell anyone what kinds of products they should or should not be allowed to purchase, let alone prevent them from doing so by refusing to make and/or sell those products? Even granting that the current gun laws in this country are clearly not sufficient to prevent multiple school shootings every month in America, do we want to have private citizens deciding which Constitutional rights their neighbors should or should not be allowed to exercise? Or should we just make products that people want to buy, offer them for sale at competitive prices, comply with all Federal, state and local laws, and let the people decide for themselves?

It’s worth thinking about…

Lounge in a Box

Once in a while I will come upon a story in the online news sites that sounds good at first look, but which demonstrates a more hopeful world view or greater faith in humanity than I have left at this point. Despite what my critics might imply, I don’t believe that all people are terrible, or that if it is possible for members of the general public to steal and/or destroy something for their own fun and profit that everyone will do so. The problem is that in many cases it only takes one bad actor to ruin everything for everyone else. I’ve often summed up businesses that failed because of the work of a limited number of bad actors with the expression “Another beautiful idea – ruined by people.” This was my first reaction to the CNN story about small, private rooms that can be rented by the hour being installed in airports…

The company behind this, which calls itself Jabbrrbox, claims that these cubicle-sized rooms can be used to provide a quiet space in which to place phone calls, get some work done, or speak with others in privacy, much like a very small, private airport lounge. The company also claims that these are more cost-effective than executive clubs offered by airlines, although at $10 for 15 minutes and $30 for a whole hour this is only the case if you are planning to use the Jabbrrbox unit for fewer than 15 hours per year (American Airlines’ “Admiral’s Club” is $450 per person per year, for example) or fewer than 2 hours in a visit (a one-day pass for the Admiral’s Club is $59). It also lacks the concierge service, refreshments, business services and other amenities one would find in a conventional executive club. It does, however, offer greater privacy – which I can’t help thinking is going to be the biggest problem…

At the moment, the Jabbrrbox units have a clear door panel, but the company is talking about equipping future units with a privacy screen, and even if they don’t, anybody could block the panel with a handful of printer paper and a spool of scotch tape. I’m not suggesting that people are going to start using the cubicles for drugs, sex, or contraband, just because they can. I’m saying that people will already use any relatively secure or temporarily private space for all of those purposes, and I can’t see anything that would keep people from doing the same with the Jabbrrbox compartments. Again, I don’t expect everyone to turn one of these cubicles into a drug den or a brothel, but it wouldn’t take more than one such bad actor to put an entire bank of them out of service…

That seems unfortunate, since this is a potentially useful service, and they’ve already got to deal with more common criminal activities like vandalism, credit card fraud, and a significant chance of squatters, including customers who will refuse to leave when their time is up and drunks passing out on the floor. I’ve written extensively in this space about how difficult it can be for an entrepreneurial start-up business to survive, let alone flourish, but in this case the company is going to have a lot more to deal with than the capitalization, cash flow, and customer development/marketing issues that will destroy more conventional businesses…

Now, I would be the first to admit that I don’t have any hard data on how much crime still goes on in American airports, any more than I know what percentage of air travelers are destructive nihilists or ugly drunks. I also have no idea what measures (if any) Jabbrrbox has in place to deal with the objections I’ve pointed out in this post. It’s entirely possible that I’m just being too conservative, pessimistic, or traditional in my assessment of this company’s long-term prospects for success; it’s also quite possible that the company has already got all of this figured out and are just waiting for clearance to start installing these private lounge units in airports all over the world. I’m just saying that whoever came up with this idea has a higher opinion of the general public, or even of air travelers, than I do…

That’s Nuts!

These are some days when I spend hours combing through news aggregation sites and actual news channels, looking for interesting and/or funny stories within a business context to write about in this space. Sometimes there will be something I want to share from my oddball life experiences, lessons I’ve learned or taught in business school, or ethical musings that are as close as an old cynic like me ever gets (or should ever get) to discussing philosophy. Sometimes there are days of quiet desperation, when neither the online news sources or my over-active imagination yield anything, and I wind up just writing insulting jokes about people I don’t like and calling it a day. And then there are days when the first headline I run across says “Fake dog testicles made this man a millionaire…”

I wrote a post about this product – known commercially as “Neuticles” – early on in the blog, but if you missed it, the idea is that some pet owners want to have their dog neutered, but don’t want the animal to look or feel any different afterwards. As is often the case with off-beat entrepreneurial projects, the company was started by a man who wanted to purchase such a product but was unable to do so because no such implants existed. Reasoning that if he wanted the product, others might also, he joined forces with a veterinarian and a group of investors and started a company which has now sold over 500,000 pairs of Neuticles at an average of $310 per pair – which works out to $155 million USD in gross sales…

You can pick up the CNN story here if you want to; alternately, you might want to look into purchasing Gregg Miller’s own book on the subject if you can find a copy – the volume, called “Going… Going… Nuts!” sadly appears to be out of print at the moment. Despite its rather unusual product and the problems inherent with making and marketing cosmetic implants for dogs (and other animals), the company itself is really the classic American entrepreneurship story of finding an empty niche and filling it. Founder Gregg Miller’s life story is a bit more eccentric, as one might expect from the inventor of cosmetic testicular implants for dogs, but in both cases I felt there was a story worth repeating here…

When I first read about Neuticles and wrote my original post on the subject I was treating it with a vaguely satirical air; the sort of (hopefully) gentle mockery that one might suggest befits anyone who would spend money on cosmetic surgery and implants for an animal that can and does eat its own droppings. That was wrong of me, and if Mr. Miller is reading this post I most sincerely apologize for any disrespect or implied criticism. The greater truth behind this story is that however bizarre I might have found his invention to be, Mr. Miller was clearly quite correct in his assessment of its commercial potential, and I should not have been critical of it without any marketing data whatsoever…

The belief that just because I find a product to be outlandish that everyone else will also have that reaction is the management error I have often presented in these posts as the “I am the World” fallacy, and I’m not sure I have ever seen a more extreme example of it. I am, after all, a management instructor and business consultant of some experience, and the product in question is bizarre enough that even CNN is treating this as a weird or amusing piece of news. Apparently it bears repeating that one should never reason ahead of one’s data, and also that while it’s true that 90% of all entrepreneurial start-ups will ultimately fail, that does mean that one out of every ten will succeed…

Even if its business concept STILL seems too outlandish for words…

Here We Go Again

I’ve written about a lot of bad crowdfunding projects in this space, to the point where I’m mostly ignoring all but the most egregious ones now. Most of these ventures appear to be the result of people who have no idea what they’re doing trying something that “must be simple.” After all, they reason, if some clown who just wanted to see how many people around the world would give him money for a batch of potato salad can get in excess of $55,000 USD, then surely people will want to kick in a few dollars to fund a breakthrough in technology and get some neat thank-you gifts. If you look through the “Not Funded” page on Kickstarter, or any of the competing sites, you will find a wealth of stories ranging from the heart-breaking to the things that make you wonder “Who thought that ANYONE would donate money for that?” But it’s starting to look as though the real problem is projects that were funded, but shouldn’t have been…

Consider, if you will, the case of Ossic, a start-up company that was promising to make headphones superior to anything currently on the market. If I’m reading the Business Insider story correctly, the idea was that the company would measure the customer’s head and ears in order to produce a customized fit, resulting in headphones that both sound better and are more comfortable to wear. The pitch was apparently convincing enough that investors contributed more than $3 million USD through their Kickstarter page, and another 22,000 people paid to pre-order the product before the company had produced anything other than an ad campaign. Everything seemed to be going well until the company announced that they had spent all of the money and would be shutting down operations without actually making any headphones…

Anyone who has been reading this blog (assuming that anyone has been reading this blog) probably saw this one coming. I’ve already brought you stories about failed Kickstarter projects to create watches, board games, movies, audio recordings, and plush toys, not to mention Go Fund Me projects (the charitable equivalent of crowdfunding) that also came to grief. What makes the Ossic project so remarkable, from where I’m sitting, is that even assuming that most of the pre-orders were for the company’s cheapest product, we’re still talking about somewhere above $4.5 million USD, which doesn’t include the $3.2 million they got crowdsourcing or the “millions of dollars” they claimed to have raised from conventional sources…

Even assuming that the company was exaggerating about their conventional funding, not to mention their claims that all of their employees had been working without pay for six months to try and fulfill their commitments to the investors, one still has to wonder how they managed to squander something in excess of $8 million without producing more than about 250 demonstrator units (to attempt to generate additional sales/investments). Did they underestimate the production costs, the time it would take to establish a revenue stream, or the overhead it would take to get fully operational? Did their business plan include paying very high salaries to their senior management team, their engineers, or their marketing personnel? Did they even have a business plan?

Another interesting question would be where they found 22,000 people who have never heard the often-quoted statistic that 90% of all entrepreneurial start-ups fail. One might reasonably assume that with the stories of failed crowdfunding projects now bouncing all over the Internet, people would be more cautious about spending money on a product that might or might not actually exist, but that does not appear to have been the case here. Even granted that the product descriptions were highly appealing (“Like virtual reality for audio!”), I have trouble picturing paying $200+ for a product that does not currently exist from a company I’ve never heard of before. Admittedly, I refused to pre-order the Apple Watch, either, and that seems to have turned out all right, but I still have to wonder…

I don’t imagine that anyone out there spent their rent money pre-ordering headphones, and it’s even harder to believe that anyone would contribute money they couldn’t afford to a crowdfunding project. What concerns me is that if projects like this one keep getting this level of negative attention, there is a real possibility that people will stop supporting new companies, either through crowdfunding and pre-orders, or possibly through more conventional channels. If that happens it seems highly likely that the rate at which new entrepreneurial ventures fail will exceed 90% - and there’s no telling how many deserving products or companies will never get their chance…

Lonely Hearts Clubs

I was a bit surprised to read a Gizmodo article earlier this week about the appearance of a specialized dating cite launched for supporters of our current President, and the launch of a competing cite (for people who oppose the current President) to compete with it. It’s not so much that people might want to seek out potential dating partners who share their political and social positions, or even that the political climate in the United States has gotten to be so toxic that anything with the President’s name on it will generate an immediate opposition and/or parody. It’s more the fact that there are apparently people out there in cyberspace who are creating specialized niche dating sites and expecting to make money in the process…

You can pick up the original Gizmodo article here if you don’t believe me, and I would completely understand if you didn’t. It turns out that there are dozens, or perhaps thousands, of sites specifically oriented to promote connections between people of all descriptions, including Trump voters, anti-Trump voters, conservatives, liberals, centrists, tall people, short people, runners, swimmers, bikers, people who support gun ownership, people who support gun control, people with allergies, people with bad haircuts, people who give haircuts but aren’t very good at it, and a bewildering array of business owners, managers, supervisors, hourly workers and academics – all of which apparently utilize the same database…

Researching the article, the author apparently discovered dozens of stolen profile pictures, and a few outright stolen identities, some of which appear on every niche dating site they had time to audit. A little digging turned up a company that will sell you all of the back-end code and data you would need to start your own dating site, including a massive (and apparently completely compromised) database of members. All you have to do is customize the front page to suit the demographic you are attempting to attract, promote your new site across the Internet, and split the $25 membership fees you will be collecting from each new member 50/50 with the company that is providing you with the code…

This isn’t a new idea, of course. The folks at Gizmodo compare it to WordPress, but to me it recalled the instant web pages on Geo Cities twenty years ago. There’s a supposedly “nominal” start-up fee (they won’t tell you how much it is unless you sign up for it first), plus optional charges to help you design your part of the state, develop a concept, put together a logo, and so on. You then get to keep between 42% and 50% of every subscription and renewal you sell. What I found the most amazing, though, was the answer on their FAQ about referrals. If you refer a “quality partner” to the provider, you will then get 10% of their commissions for life. Whether or not you get 10% of their 10% of the people they recruit is unclear, although it is certainly implied that you do. If that’s true, we’ve definitely heard this story before…

Why exactly no one (not even the Gizmodo reporter who blew the lid off this story) seems to have recognized this as an online adaptation of the classic multi-level marketing (MLM) scheme is beyond me. Of course, why anyone in 2018 would still want to pay money to be involved in anything as sketchy as an MLM is also beyond me, but that’s really not the point. Even if the idea of making money off a dating site in a world that already has the Tinder, OkCupid , and Match sites, plus dozens of social media channels that don’t cost anything to use doesn’t make you want to call shenanigans on the whole concept, you’d still expect anyone who encounters it to ask if anyone has ever made money on this or any other MLM scheme…

I’m not going to post a link to the actual dating site provider because I don’t want to encourage this sort of crap; I’m not going to mention them by name, either, because I don’t really enjoy being sued by people who make their living by taking money from the greedy, the gullible, and the occasional credulous idiot. I will just suggest that if you have your heart set on diving into some get-rich-quick scheme there are better ways to go about that…

What Comes Around…

Some years ago I brought you the story of the My Coke Rewards program, and the similar promotion called “Pepsi Stuff” that the Coca-Cola Company first mocked and then copied. Both of these were essentially the classic “box-tops” concept that has been in use since at least the 1920s. Send current marketing, contact, and demographic information along with proof-of-purchase (generally the tops of a specific number of packages) and occasionally a small sum of money, and the company will send you any one of a number of cheap “prizes.” Some of these are simply advertising pieces in their own right (hats or t-shirts with the company name and logo on them), while others are furnished by other companies as part of a shared advertising deal. How effective these schemes really are remains somewhat debatable…

British novelist Dorothy Sayers, who actually worked in advertising in real life, explained the basic issues in her 1933 novel Murder Must Advertise. Unless the company running the promotion requires its customers to pay a “shipping and handling” fee – which dramatically lowers the effectiveness of the promotion – the company will have to pay for verifying the participating applications, buying and warehousing the “prizes,” and shipping the goods to the customer out of its advertising budget. The problem becomes how many additional sales the company will realize as a result of the promotion, and how much of the resulting profits they are willing to spend. Too many prizes, or too much value per prize unit, and the costs will eat any resulting increase in profits; too few prizes or too little value per prize unit and no one will participate in the promotion. And that doesn’t even consider aspects like fraud, forgery, or potential damage to the company’s brand identity…

In the original “Pepsi Stuff” promotion the company had to contend with all of these problems and then some. Much of what they were offering did indeed consist of cheap promotional materials for which an absurd amount of “proof-of-purchase” was required, and the few attempts at prizes with an intrinsic value ended up causing trouble, as in the case where a “joke” offering of a Harrier jump-jet resulted in a lawsuit from someone who claimed to have been deceived by the offer of a $30 million military jet for the equivalent of about $750,000 cash. The Coca-Cola people appeared to be watching the whole situation with glee, and wasted no time running their own ads mocking the Pepsi promotion, before starting their own version 10 years later…

Over time, the Coke version of the promotion grew unfeasibly expensive and began causing the company other problems, until they gradually converted it into recruiting for customer-generated content on Twitter about a year ago. I was therefore not particularly surprised to see a relaunch of the Pepsi Stuff program at the beginning of 2018. If the previous iterations are anything to go by, we should expect to see the Pepsi version end in another six to eight months, with everything you’d actually want going out of stock by the end of this summer. Meanwhile, the Coke ads mocking the new Pepsi version should launch sometime in the next month or so. It will be interesting to see if Coke bothers to create new ads of mockery, or if it just dusts off the old ones and starts airing them again. It will also be interesting to see if they re-launch their own version of it again around 2028 or so…

Now, I’d be the first to admit that I’m not clear on what either of these companies think they’re going to accomplish by using and re-using a promotion style that was old before most of their present customers were born. It’s true that all of the proofs-of-purchase are electronic these days, based on codes entered online, and it’s also true that modern automated fulfillment systems take most of the labor expenses out of the equation. And if there has been any reduction in the appeal of getting something for nothing, or in the number of people who are naïve enough to believe that you can get something for nothing, news of the decline has yet to make it to Central Michigan. But I can’t help thinking that unless somebody comes up with a new idea for a product promotion this whole cycle will just keep coming around again…