Title: Is Anything In Life Ever Really Free? - Postconsumers
Headings: Is Anything In Life Ever Really Free?
Is Anything In Life Ever Really Free?
Nothing is Ever Free If It Came With Something You Paid For
So What is Free?
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Content: For example, if you need to spend $50 on a website to get “free” shipping, then what that tells you is that the items on the website are marked up so much that as soon as you hit $50 you have paid for the actual cost of the goods plus your shipping charges (and, typically, at least one cent of profit). So you never really got anything for “free” – you simply earned the company slightly less profit. And you may not have even done that depending on their pricing model! It is true that sometimes freebies known as “loss leaders” do exist. This, you might remember, was essentially the entire business model of Groupon. The idea was that vendors and merchants would give away a “free” item as a way to get you to try out their business, product or service. It’s true that if you did what most Groupon members do and take the freebie and never go back, that business lost money (that’s why Groupon hasn’t necessarily been successful in the long term). But for smart businesses, that freebie is a way to get more money out of you. Either they are good at convincing you that you want a service or product upgrade, or they leverage the contact information that they got from you when you took the freebie to market other products and services to you. Typically, your freebie turns into more money spent rather than just a pure free gift.