Buy One, Get One Free: The Art Of The Modern Day Gimmick In A Sluggish Economy

Buy one, get one free…get a free turkey just for test-driving a 2006 Honda Accord…valued customers receive an extra 10 percent off all purchases…the previous examples are all gimmicks, gimmicks designed to draw in potential buyer or customers. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don’t.

All businesses have gimmicks to lure folks in to sell their good or their junk, depending on how you look at it; some companies know how to do it well, while others don’t know how to hang onto their clientele.

In a blistering economy, where jobs are supposedly plentiful, yet prices are high for virtually all goods and textiles, the lonely businessman needs an incentive to bring in customers as well as keep his current stable of patrons too, so they offer incentives like free food, gift cards/certificates, free music (CDs & tapes), free visuals (DVDs & Videotapes) and of course percentages off of goods.

Five years ago, when I was among the ranks of the unemployed, I tried to find ways to amuse myself after spending hours looking for work or responding to advertisements. I’d search the newspapers & the Internet for fun and adventure, and then I fell into a couple of possibilities; that of test-driving new cars.

It didn’t take me much effort to do that. All I needed to do was listen to the high-pitched pressure salesman as I drove the car and get the gift! My roommates at the time felt I was wasting my efforts on this that was until some of the gifts started arriving in the mail including a four-CD box set consisting of 30 years of highlights from a Canadian jazz festival and a giant Igloo cooler.

When I test-drove a Saturn during that same time period, I received a $25 Borders Books & Music, gift card. Credit card companies often give away loads of free stuff like mugs, ball-caps, pens Tupperware & tee shirts. All this just to sign up for a credit card? You betcha!

The best gimmick by far is the “buy one get one free” deal. Grocery stores, retail fast food restaurants and many other businesses employ this sort of deal the most in order to get the customer to keep coming back for more unique deals and most patrons do come back. Besides that gimmick, there’s also the ever-popular free sample tables they set up on weekends in grocery stores and that keeps people coming back in droves.

The most recent within the last 10 years or so, that has kept customers coming back for more is the “preferred (discount) card,” in which customers of a particular store will get 50 cents or a couple of dollars off an item on sale and it does change all of the time, so people do come back for more, the main idea being that this particular gimmick keeps drawing people in for a lifetime. I’d say with the way America is going to hell in a hack, chances are these gimmicks will last forever!