“You are entitled to a free trip to Las Vegas. Stay on the line and one of our operators will be with you in a minute to give you the details on how you can enjoy a weekend in Sin City…on Us!.” In other words “Money for Nothing...” and being in Las Vegas, there is the implication “…and Chicks for Free!”
(http://www.lyricsfreak.com/d/dire+straits/money+for+nothing_20040681.html)
Ah…Money for Nothing. Who wouldn’t want that? This is a permanent part of the American Dream and it keeps resurfacing in one form after another on almost a daily basis. What kind of a secret buyer would I be if I didn’t see what the catch is because we all know there is no such thing as a free lunch let alone money for nothing; so I stayed on the phone to hear what the catch is.
They lied right off the bat. The operator wasn’t there in a minute. It was seven minutes. If I weren’t doing research I’d have hung up about five minutes and thirty-seconds ago; which got me to thinking. Since I didn’t hang up, and they didn’t seem to concerned about that…there had to be a reason why they were keeping me on hold. So I began to listen closer to the advertorials playing between snippets of the worst hold music in the world.
I am almost praying for an operator to come on to save me from the hold music. As I type this I have a revelation. The horrible hold music is their secret weapon. The dangle the promise of a weekend in “Sin City” on them, implying all expenses paid, then they pummel your brain until every shred of common sense is beaten out of you, and when the pitch comes, with few brain cells left functioning, you’ll sign up no questions asked.
“Hello, I’m Amanda. Have you ever been to Las Vegas?” So I decide to play dumb to see what the pitch is, “Not for quite a while.” Basically what followed next was a very long, a very dry, and a very boring presentation on Vacation Timeshares.
I was very upset, because I had waited on line and suffered through the horrible music and endless series of commercials on the phone, and now that I am talking to the operator with a flat voice obviously reading from a script, I am insulted. I am insulted by the fact they can put together an approach this bad, this poorly executed and have it work.
Then it hit me, the approach works because of greed! Greed is the reason bad telemarketing works.
Greed is the reason people will eat the uneatable and in the process humiliate themselves on national television. Greed is the reason why people will spend money they can’t afford on lottery tickets. Greed is the reason why smart people make bad choices. Greed is why students cheat on tests and term papers, to raise their test scores high enough to get into good colleges so they can get great jobs and make a lot of money.
Greed is also why smart people get caught when they do things they shouldn’t. I watched a documentary on crime where some very highly paid computer engineers figured out a way rig slot machines. All they needed to do was to consistently win a little over time and they could have milked the gaming industry forever, but they got greedy and won a lot in a very short time and got caught.
Greed is why people lose money investing in real estate and the stock markets, they want big money fast, and safe stable investments take too long to pay off for them. It’s why the “penny stock market” continues to flourish despite a long and public history of people losing all the money they invest.
There is a saying everyone knows and agrees is true. "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." Yet people overlook it when it comes to making investments. Greed is why Nigerians can send emails around the world and get people to send them money and reveal personal banking information before they get taken for everything they have.
A friend of mine owns a Oriental Rug store, and one day he got ten orders online for thousands of dollars of rugs. He ran the cards and they were approved, then the shipping clerk came to him when he noticed one odd thing the ten orders had in common. The "ship to" was the same address in Nigeria. What are the odds that ten US citizens moved to the same house in Nigeria and had the urge to remodel at the same time.
He called the bank, they did research and called back a couple of hours later and informed him all those credit cards were now in the process of being cancelled due to fraudulent transactions. Seems that ten more greedy people fell for the Nigerian get rich quick scheme.
It’s hard to believe that in this day and age, Ponzi schemes are still going strong which brings us full circle to the end of the timeshare presentation. As she was winding up, Amanda talked about my timeshare being more than a vacation option, it is also an investment opportunity.
Should I ever decide I am through taking vacations I can sell it and recover my “investment” and basically had all those vacations in wonderful places around the world for “free.” It’s just more money for nothing; and with the “mandatory attendance” at the presentation where I sign up being in Sin City the implications are “..and chicks for free!”
1 comment:
One of many thoughts came rushing forward as I read this post, but a law of the universe is the one that stuck- Money Moves!
If I say to you, "Ken here is $100 no strings attached," and check back with you in just a day or so the money is likely to not be in your pocket. This scenario is played out everyday at every level of the econmy.
You can't steal it. You can't print it. (Without going to jail.) However everyday customers and business owners alike seem to forget it. Why? You nailed it greed.
In the 1980's when Gordon Gecko said, "greed is good." in the movie Wall Street America was a different place. As we continue through this time warp of generational change the so called x and y generations as a group simply don't believe in this approach.
This is one of many reasons why we will continue to see a huge decline in the effectiveness of mass media advertising. Furniture retailers had better wise up.
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