Be Lambic or Green

Giving away free stuff

For the moving sale we had recently, Jen carefully prepared a whole bunch of “surprise” gift bags containing various useless paper products and other goodies. We were selling them for $1 each.

They did not sell well.

We needed to get rid of them, so I decided to take them to work and hand them out to my colleagues. I got as far as the train and decided the bag was too heavy to carry all the way to work. My solution was to hand the gift bags out to all the people sitting in my chosen train car.

I guess in this cynical world we live in people don’t expect to get something for nothing, so I received many bemused looks. It seemed as though most people thought I was a complete weirdo or I was selling something. Some people even refused my offer.

Out of about 40 people I gave bags to I got about 5 thank yous. The people who said thank you were invariably under 16. Do we get less polite as we get older?

This post was published on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 10:57 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Giving away free stuff”

Paul Says:

November 29th, 2006 at 11:33 am

Less polite? Or more cynical? I think you nailed it when you said people suspected you were selling something. It is unfortunate that, in this day and age, we must be immediately suspicious of any offer of somethign for nothing.

Shawn Campbell Says:

November 30th, 2006 at 9:14 am

There is no such thing as something for nothing.
The cynical people were right. You were giving them something (useless paper products), and in return, you didn’t have to lug your junk around anymore… They did!

T’was a nice gesture, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I can relate to the cynical ones. I certainly wouldn’t want other people’s junk, unless it wasn’t junk to me.

There is a program called “modern robin hood”, or something like that. They go around giving away free money, and filming it. It still isn’t something for nothing, they are getting free publicity in return, and thus, more people to their site, and thus, more revenue from AdSense (it may even be profitable).

Something for nothing indeed…

lambic Says:

November 30th, 2006 at 9:34 am

Maybe you got the wrong impression from my use of Jen’s favourite terminology “useless paper products”. The gift bags contained quality greeting cards and postcards.

You’re right though, there’s no such thing as complete altruism, whenever we do anything considered altruistic there is always some personal gain, even if it’s just the feel-good factor of doing something good.

Of course, the only reason I was lugging my junk around was to give it to people, I just didn’t lug it as far as I’d planned. It would’ve been a lot easier to throw the whole lot into the recycling bin.