Because I have one of those "affinity membership cards" from our local grocery store, I tend to get various offers in my email. I have a love/hate relationship with them because I do need to budget and save when it comes to groceries, but at the same time I passionately loathe the volume of spammy messages I get.
Anyway, every now and then, these emails will include coupons for so-called "free" promotions, encouraging me to try some new product.
Sounds like a great gig, right?
But the old TANSTAAFL (There ain't no such thing as a free lunch) priciple invariably applies... as does the marketing truism that "if it seems like there's no cost, then YOU are the product!"
Anyway, I got another coupon for a free soda, allegedly because "you are such a loyal customer!"
So I loaded it up on my affinity card, to use next time I went to the store.
EXCEPT... the store doesn't actually carry the 16oz size I was allegedly getting for free, they only carry the 20oz size of the product.
Maybe I'm overly skeptical/cynical, but chances are that the promotion was not at all about getting me to try a new brand of soda, but about trying to get me to buy the larger size... at full price.
It's not the first time I have received an offer for s free product that isn't actually on the shelves.
I guess the moral of the story is to never let your food shopping plan be contingent on offers you might have received!
From where I am sitting, the word "free" — in a commercial context — is pretty much synonomous with "entrapment" of some kind.
Our local pet store offers a sort of membership where you get a "free bag" of cat food or cat litter for every ten bags you buy. What you're really looking at there is a 10% discount, but the way it's packaged is designed to trap you into always buying one particular brand/product — typically at full price — in order to get that 10th free bag!
In the meantime, you would probably have been better off — on a net/net basis — just shopping for whatever was on sale, wherever you could find it.
The other kind of "FREE" that really tends to get to people (and annoys the hell out of me) — with the exception of the uncommonly diligent and watchful — is so-called "free trials."
"Try our service for absolutely free for three months!"
While it may be authentically true, the gimmick here is really that the majority of the world will have forgotten all about the "free trial" by the time 90 days roll around. And then it might take a couple of monthly cycles before anyone really pays attention to a recurring $4.95 monthly charge. And then you'll likely discover that it is a hellish and time consuming nightmare to actually cancel that subscription. And then you might discover that it may take "4-6 weeks for changes to your account to be applied."
By the end of it all, that "free" trial has turned out to be anything but free... not to mention the "hidden costs" of frustration and spikes in your blood pressure!
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great weekend!
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2026.09.12 01:12 PDT
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