People never cease to amaze me when it comes to the opportunity for receiving free food.
For those of you lucky enough not to live in the Upper Midwest, let me bring you up to speed on the Minneapolis “situation”. I walked into the local sub joint a couple weeks ago. As standard with most walk-in retail food operators, a fishbowl is perched near the checkout register, asking people to drop in their business card for a chance to win a free six inch sub.
Retail value of six inch sub: less than $5.00.
I noticed that next to the free-sub fishbowl, was yet another fishbowl. This second fishbowl had been placed there by another business looking to drum up sales leads. This second fishbowl, placed by the largest Minneapolis athletic club had an pretty cool offer. Somebody’s card would be chosen at random at that winner would receive a free year’s membership at the gym.
Retail value of annual membership: $250.
Of course, you all see where this is headed. The ratio of business cards in the free-sub fishbowl to the free-membership fishbowl was, approximately, 4,567 to 1.
Thought #1: What is wrong with people? Thought #2: Never underestimate the power of food to coerce, soothe, impress, broker introduction and ingratiate.
Must start using food as an advertising gimmick for the business here…
Food…
Funny you should mention food.
Today is my day 1 on the “Induction” phase of the Atkins diet. I by no means intend to follow strictly what he taught, but I’m interested in finding out if, while eating roughly the same amount of calories as usual, I lose weight using it. It will be kind of fun! I’m sitting here right now with a small mountain of chicken in front of me, some green beans, and a salad. I never dreamed of eating this way on my previous calorie-reduced diets… it remains to be seen whether it works. I’ve always been a fan of “eat less and exercise more” 🙂 Then again, I’m still a little over 30 lbs overweight, too. According to US stats, they say I’m more like seventy over, but there’s no way my six-foot-tall frame is fitting in 160 lbs…
I agree, food is a powerful motivator. I’m finding my mind turning now to the fact I’m unemployed, and suddenly a half-dozen of my close friends are as well. We’re all technologists, very smart, many of us highly educated, and motivated to make money. I’m convinced if we put us all in a room together, we could figure out something brilliant to put our brains behind and make a success. And I’m guessing food would somehow fit into the equation for manipulating people into buying whatever we’d sell…
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Matthew P. Barnson
Mmm.. food
heh.. I just wrote along food comment elsewhere, so I’ll just say..
GREAT PIC SAM!
JT
Hate to break it to you…
I hate to break it to you, but I was the one that did the hack job to get Sam’s picture up 🙂 I went through a bunch of photos of his band on a really slow connection to find one that would work, imported it into The Gimp, lassoed that crop, pasted it to a new image, desaturated it to make it black & white, then reduced it to 85×83 pixels so it fits in the “avatar space” on the site.
But yeah, he looks good 🙂
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Matthew P. Barnson
Food->SPam
So let me guess…I bet these business cards have email addresses on them. Can you say SPAM-central?
I wish I could dig up a pic of Sam at college with the hermaphroditic black blow-up doll we got him for his 21st b-day…but he never came out of the room with him/her. Well, except when he went camping with the rugby team and strapped her to the roof of Jason Smith’s Jeep and went to Gattysburg.
Ah, those were the days… Weed