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: They’re just not usually attached to a consumer purchase. Let’s think about what’s not free … and then let’s make a list of what is! Nothing is Ever Free If It Came With Something You Paid For
This is the first thing that you need to understand. If you paid for anything in order to get your “free” item, then it was never, ever free. The cost of free items is always worked into the dollar amount that you need to spend to get the free item. 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.