SOMETHING FOR NOTHING

I recently bought, in my ongoing quest to be on the unhealthiest possible diet for a man of my age, a bag of tortilla chips and a jar of salsa dip. “Mmmm!” thought I, “Tasty!” but, as the pounds are starting to pile on of late, and I would rather like to not have my expanding stomach come between me, the steering wheel, the table or any other object that I’m likely to want to spend much time in close proximity to, they both remain untouched, waiting for the inevitable evening when I plonk myself down on the sofa with a longish movie to get through and my brain decides that it’s hungry, even though my evening meal is not even beginning to be digested.

The tortilla chips went “out of sight, out of mind” into the cupboard and the jar sat there on the worktop, almost smiling up at me whenever I went near to the kettle or the toaster. I hadn’t really paid it much attention when I bought it, I just checked in the supermarket that the label claimed that it was my dip of choice and not some gag-reflex inducing nonsense, and flung it into the cart with all the other non-health foodstuffs and carried on along my way, paid for it and carried it home, trusting that lugging a huge bag of groceries burned off enough calories that would more than compensate for the treats and goodies contained within.

Fat chance! (So to speak…).

So, whilst the kettle was waiting to boil one morning, the jar once more caught my eye. It had a sticky label attached to its lid offering me the opportunity to win all kinds of salsa related treats if only I would visit their website and get up to whatever shenanigans were required to get all my details for their marketing department to sift through and better target weak-willed individuals like myself to stock up on even more of their chips and dips in future.

Reading through this unexpected “opportunity” made me feel rather sad, strangely, at the apparent loss of a certain marketing strategy to this strange new one that requires a certain amount of proactive involvement on the part of the customer. Once upon a time, such sticky labels might conceal a second label underneath it, or promise a mysterious symbol or slogan might be found inside the jar. I suppose it used to be what you might want to think of as the “Willy Wonka” marketing style, in the sense that your Mars Bar (or whatever else you had bought) might just contain a legend (that elusive “Golden Ticket”) that announced that you had won a car, or a holiday or £100,000. I never knew anyone who ever did of course. The most anyone I knew ever seemed to get was another free Mars Bar (or its equivalent) which at least gave “another chance to win” the speedboat or the dream house or the lifetime supply of whatever it was, which inevitably turned out to be the familiar phrase “Sorry, you have not been lucky this time, but…” that seemed to be more or less paraphrased in a lot of my job applications in those days, too.

Rather interestingly, and as a slight aside, I once read that the most consistent unit of fiscal measurement in the UK during the post-war era was the standard Mars Bar. House prices and car prices might well have skyrocketed over the course of half a century, but the cost in equivalent Mars Bars apparently stayed pretty much constant, which is, I suppose, mildly interesting, if you like that sort of thing.

Anyway, back to the plot.

Marketing was never the subtlest of the dark arts, but it seems that that so-called random factor (like a tractor, weave your way…) has been pretty much removed for the Ordinary Joe now. They no longer seem to be interested in you if you are not the sort of customer who is “webbed up”, and so, if you want the chance to not win that dream prize, you have to get your backside over to your computer or whatever device you choose to use to organise your weblife, and make the effort to go and have a look, whilst logging in all sorts of personal data that they did at least once have the decency to make it worth your while to do. With your own pen and possibly your investment in buying a stamp. That, of course, it is assumed, is too much effort for the modern day gullible punter. Yes, it seems that these things are all done via websites now. Webs are weaved and, like the buzzing bluebottles we are, we fly right into them with the tempting promise of “something for nothing” that we all know is highly unlikely, but still draws us in anyway.

Competitions are funny old things. The odds against winning anything at all seem to be so utterly remote that it’s hardly worth entering and yet, precisely because that’s what a lot of other people think, sometimes you decide that it’s possibly worth a punt. Sadly the odds are pretty much always stacked against you, in fact, it’s almost so unlikely that you would win that it’s barely worth entering. Of course there are deep psychological factors at play here. If  you think that no-one else will bother, your own chances increase, don’t they?

I went through a short spate of winning stuff a few years ago, from a magazine that I regularly bought. You had to come up with something witty that made the editorial team laugh, and for a few months, for some unfathomable reason, I became quite successful at doing so, and acquired a number of DVD box sets to bolster my fledgling collection, all of them of the sort that I could have bought from the bargain bins or sales about six months later, but it made me happy for a time. Then they changed the system to the more financially lucrative (for them...) “text in” option which didn’t even require any skilful word-wrangling, but merely chose a random winner from a list, and, being reluctant to join the mobile phone world, that short period of successfulness drifted from my grasp again.

So the lure of that elusive “something for nothing” will continue to tempt us, no matter how much we’re utterly sure we’ll never, ever win, there’s still that slight possibility lurking at the back of our mind and whispering to us that we might, though. After all, I suppose someone will win the EuroSquillions jackpot tonight (maybe it will be you, and, if it is you, I hope that it brings you everything you dream of...), just as I’m completely certain it isn’t going to be me, as I have no ticket. I mean, I know that I am completely capable of all manner of hypocrisy, but even I have to draw a line somewhere, as it were...