WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll ·
05/12/2020 15:20
Am I the only one who hates the 'modern' way of participating with promotions in the vague hope of winning a prize?
In the old days, you knew where you stood: the food manufacturer would splash a big, eye-catching 'Win a X !!!' logo on the wrapper or packet, you would (they hoped) be far more inclined to buy one because of that, so they sold more, you bought one and found a message inside the wrapper/packet saying either "You have won!" (0.1%) or "Bad luck - buy another and try again!" (99.9%). If you had won, you would call or email them with the verifying code or send the winning wrapper to them. It was a balanced two-way deal between customer and manufacturer.
Nowadays, you have to enter the code online and then register, giving them all of your contact details to exploit (and sell on) forever, before discovering the overwhelming probability that you haven't won anything.
I bought my DS a tube of Pringles for a treat and he was excited at the thought of seeing if we'd won a prize. In order to find out, I would need to 'register for a Pringles account'. What on earth would I want that for?! It's not like I'm going to be ordering Pringles from them or making any other transactions. It's not exactly selling your soul, but it does seem like me going to all of that effort to 'give' myself to their advertising database that would follow, haunt and spam me for years to come. Stuff that, the prizes weren't even that exciting anyway!
I always used to get quite excited (pathetic, I know - I was a lot younger!) at buying something and knowing that, when I opened the wrapper, I might discover then and there that I had won something. I actually did win a particularly nice prize doing just that once. Nowadays, I just see the promotions and ignore them as I consider them pretty much a (legal) 'scam'.