Selling Ice to Eskimos

.

Eskimos live in cold places. They have plenty of ice sitting around, and they can make more any time they want it. Wouldn't it be great, though, if we could sell them our ice? We can carve it out of the same places they get theirs, and then convince them that our ice is better than their ice so they'll buy it from us. The only problem I foresee is that they'll only be able to pay us in fish, and I don't think Walmart takes fish as a payment option for giant-screen TVs, though I could be wrong. Even if they do, I'm not sure what the exchange rate is.

But maybe we can do something equally preposterous. Maybe we can sell water to people who are already paying for a residential water system. We'll bottle it up and sell it for ridiculous prices.

Maybe you're wondering why people would buy our water when it would be so much cheaper and easier for them to simply drink water out of their faucet like they used to do even 10 years ago, or, if they don't like the impurities, why they don't buy a water filter and a reusable container, like a glass or a water bottle.

Simple.



We'll claim it's healthier or tastes better or something. We'll pretend there are advantages to drinking our water. We'll con some celebrity into liking us, and then get them to endorse us to their celebrity friends and all their fans. It's not hard at all, if we simply do it the way the inventors of Scientology did.

We'll use all the same marketing techniques that the soft drink makers use. Essentially we'll equate it in the minds of people to BE soft drinks, except healthier AND cheaper. We'll avoid all comparisons to tap water, because we can't possibly compete with free. The RIAA and MPAA have sued thousands of their own customers for billions of dollars to prove it, so I'm pretty sure it's true. It explains why Windows can dominate the market when they charge hundreds of dollars when Linux is free and no one's ever heard of it. Nope, we're not going to compete with free tap water, so get that unproductive idea out of your head.

By putting ourselves against soft drinks, and being a healthier and cheaper alternative, we can't lose. Before you know it, all those landfills will be full of OUR bottles instead of Coke and Pepsi's bottles.

Where to get this magical water? Why from the same place everyone already gets their water! It's the ultimate irony, selling someone something they're already paying someone else for! We'll filter out the smells and colors, of course, since we say we've got pure water in our bottles, but nothing special; just enough to get the job done so we don't have any complainers saying we're not what we say we are.

With the proper marketing slant, we'll usurp the soft drink empires. It will take some time for this con to take hold, but once it does, the profits will be astronomical!

So, anyone want to invest in a sure thing?

.

Discount Cards

.

Thank you for letting me scam you last week.

Scams are awesome, aren't they? I've got a few of them I'd like to tell you about, and then we can work together and do what's morally required of us: parting suckers from their money.

A great way to part suckers and their money is to make them feel like they're getting a huge discount on what you're selling. And for eons, the traditional route to doing so has been to inflate the price and quote that to the customer, then let him haggle you down. It has worked well in the open-air markets of the world for millennia. Americans haven't directly experienced the joy of haggling in quite some time outside of a car lot, but if you'd like to see how it works, you can easily take a trip to Mexico and give it a try. I got my first experience when I was briefly stationed in San Diego. A couple weekends, we went down to Tijuana.

In Tijuana, and probably other Mexican border towns like Juarez, there is a touristy section of town where the locals bring what you're supposed to believe are handmade crafts (many of which might actually be) and if you pay the asking price, you're going to feel ripped off when you ask your buddy who DID haggle what they paid. For example, I found a really nice onyx chess set. After some haggling, I bought it for about $15. I have since seen the same set in two or three different stores selling for $50. I think I got a good deal! But if I hadn't haggled, I would've wound up paying about $30 or more.

Since we in America don't haggle on anything but the price of a car any more, and we all dread doing that, we don't get much experience with it, and it makes us pretty vulnerable to scams which use this simple principle of asking for a lot more than it's worth.

So it's not at all uncommon to see sales advertised which offer large discounts of 25%, 30% or even more, but which in actuality are the same price as before the sale. You've heard the deal: "They marked it up 35% so they could offer a 30% discount."

So let's do something like that ourselves, except we're going to do something different so people won't realize we're scamming them the same way everyone else does. What we're going to do differently is create a membership club for our grocery store. We'll even print up special cards so that people feel special, and at the cash register, they'll have to sign up for and use those cards to get discounts and sales.

This way, we can jack up ALL the prices in our store, then offer discounts on a few items for those people who have the card, and at the register, we'll tell them how much they've "saved" so they feel like it was worth it to get this card. We could sell them this card, but we could also give them away for free so that our customers feel like we're giving them something for free on top of the discounts.

Of course, it costs money to get these cards printed and get the card-reading equipment and track our customers and do all that obnoxious paperwork just to get the card, but we'll just pass those costs along to the customer. We can't add those costs to just the non-card-users, because there won't be many of them, and it would drive business away, but if we apply the additional cost burden too ALL customers, it will be harder for them to notice.

This puts us at a pricing disadvantage against any store which does NOT use this expensive system, but what are we going to do? We can't accept a smaller profit; I NEED a new swimming pool because the old one got wet! I think the "savings" we'll report to the customer should suffice to distract them from it. Most people believe anything you tell them if you say it with enough authority and conviction.

But wait, I've got another great idea!

Since we're already tracking what people are buying with their cards, why don't we use this information to make even more money off them? For instance, we can use what's called "targeted advertising" to send them ads regarding things they buy and things similar to things they buy. This should keep us on their minds so they don't leave us, and it should bring them in to check out those alternatives. They'll think we're very relevant and that we have everything they're looking for on sale all the time!

It will take a little while to get this information, and then to make use of it, but once we do have it, we have a choice of either lowering our prices or of pocketing the profits. HAHAHAHA!!! Yeah, like we'd ever choose to lower our prices! Had you going there, didn't I?

But wait, there's still a lot more we can do!

Our store doesn't carry everything everyone wants. It's simply not possible, and trying to do otherwise would cost too much. Let Bass Pro handle motorboats, we'll take care of groceries.

But people still DO want to buy stuff we don't have. How to profit on those sales? Simple! The stuff that people DO buy from us can still be used to find out other things people want to buy which we don't carry. What if we sold that data to other companies who DO sell those things? We can make as much in selling this behavioral data as we can in our actual business, and it's all PURE PROFIT! Our customers have already bought the equipment required to track what they're doing, we'll leave it to the other businesses which buy our data to interpret it; after all, we can't possibly know what they're looking for or how to get it from the data.

We'll get business from more than just Bass Pro. Think of all the insurance companies wanting to find evidence that their customers might have undisclosed health problems that they should be getting charged for. Think of all the mass-email-marketers who are looking for suckers to buy viagra. Think of all the government agencies desperate to find out what Americans are doing; and not just OUR government, but all of them! And think of all the uses we can't ourselves even conceive of! There's no limit to the uses that the data could be used for, or the people who will buy that data.

This is again PURE PROFIT, and the customers will eagerly give us all the information we want because we're making them think we've saved them 20 cents on a dozen eggs or a pair of crappy China-made shoes. It's a windfall like no other.

So what do you say? Can I count on your investment in a sure thing?

.

Favorite Rip-offs

.

Recently, some pretty ridiculous things have been assaulting me from the TV, from friends, and even my own family. I've shared a handful of them with you from time to time, but of late, it seems like there's a lot more than usual going on. It occurred to me that Snopes.com has a good thing going on: they expose fakes and the like, and they're pretty much the authority about that kind of thing. They've branded themselves well. I've always liked debunkers, which I suppose is why I have a lot of respect for Snopes, Mythbusters, and the Amazing Randy and Johnny Carson. Yep, I like Adam and Jaime for more than their ability to blow things sky high.

I came up with a great idea on how to rip off people while making them think I'm doing them a favor. Actually, I thought of a few ways, and I'll share them now and then. Today's idea has to do with on-line auctions.

Imagine for a moment that you wanted to run an auction website. How do you cut in on giants like Ebay? You have to come up with something different, of course. Like so...


In the online auction world, people sit up and take notice if you can promise them they can buy the stuff they want at pennies on the dollar. Designer labels for 90% off? You got it! Vacations for $20? Absolutely! New Corvette tickling your fancy? Why pay $70,000 when you can have one for $900? The hawt chicks won't know the difference! I can already hear you begging me to tell you how to get these deals and more.

If you cruise on over to Ebay, chances are pretty good you can find something you're looking for, and its current price is something ridiculously low. So you right quick make a bid for it; A new laptop for $50, baby! But the bidding increments are big, like $1, or $5, or even larger. I've seen bidding increments on some auction sites as high as 25% of the current price! Who wants to pay that?

So we'll offer bidding increments of 1 cent. Can't get any smaller than that! But there's another problem with online auctions: people routinely overbid.

I see it all the time. I find something really cool, like maybe a new hard drive or camera. I find out what it would cost to buy it at Newegg or Walmart and sure enough, the bidding goes over its value, usually in its last few minutes. It happens so often, it's almost impossible to get a good deal on anything I'm looking for. How do we overcome this?

We make it cost a dollar to bid! Genius! Now things won't get overbid on!

But wait, there's more. Because the prices are low, people will still be inclined to bid a lot. For instance, if a phone you're looking for would normally cost $100, it might sell here for $10. If the bidding increment is only a penny, who wouldn't bid for 90% off? Even people who've already bid a few times would probably bid another time or two.

On the surface, it sounds pretty fantastic: Getting to buy a $100 item for only $10, plus a few bids at a dollar apiece. But let's look a little closer.

At a penny per bid, how many times DID you bid? Is it possible you got into a bidding war with someone, maybe you bid 10 or 20 times? Maybe 30 or 40 times? Maybe 100 or 200 times? Sounds ridiculous, but let's look even closer.

If the bidding started at 1 cent, and got up to $10.00, that's 1000 bids. Could you have bid 10 or 20 or 40 or 100 times? That's $100 worth of bidding if you did!

But you're not that careless with your money, are you? Maybe you'd only bid 10 times if it was something you really wanted. $20 for a $100 phone is still a pretty good deal. But let's look at it from the other side.

With 1000 bids, that's $1000 spent just on bidding for a $100 phone!!! Can you see the possibilities? Isn't this a great scam? All we need is a snappy name!

I'd use something like QuiBids or BeeZid, but those're already taken. Anyone got a better name? Anyone got some money to invest? Guaranteed return on investment!

.