You’re human, and so you like free stuff. But the next time you see the word “free,” keep in mind the old saying: There’s no such thing as a free lunch — especially if it means you have to pay for breakfast and dinner to get that lunch.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t accept a free offer. With free samples at the grocery store, eat away. If you get a free sample of a toothpaste or shampoo in the mail, take it — that’s yours. In both instances, the giver is hoping you’ll like the product and become a customer, but whether you become one or not is up to you.
This is all obvious territory that any 12-year-old could understand. But because we’re human, and we can get greedy, it’s easy to forget that a lot of free trials and offers come with hidden costs.
So the next time you’re offered something “free,” remember: There are several scenarios in which free isn’t really free.
If you’re spending time. That doesn’t mean you won’t feel your free item isn’t worth it in the end. But, first, ask yourself how much your time is worth.
Matt Casady, a marketing specialist who works in American Fork, Utah, says that 10 years ago, he was a “starving college student” and decided to enter a longtime, ongoing contest that the chicken sandwich chain Chick-fil-A offers every time it opens a new restaurant. The first 100 people in line will receive one Chick-fil-A meal once a week, for a year.
Casady and his roommate decided to camp out in the parking lot of a new Chick-fil-A in Provo, Utah. The problem? It was 22 degrees and snowing.
“I never thought I’d be willing to freeze my butt off just for some free chicken,” Casady says.
He didn’t even get all 52 weeks since there was an overflow of 100 people willing to freeze that night, which meant there was a raffle to see which 100 people would receive the store’s coupons. Casady lost the raffle, but fortunately, his roommate won and split the 52 coupons with him.
Jon Colgan, a resident of the Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, area who owns a cellphone-switching business called CellBreaker.com, has a similar story. He and his three college roommates, and sometimes other friends, slept overnight in the parking lots of eight Chick-fil-A restaurants over the course of a year. That meant they were eating multiple free meals every week for, well, a long time.
Colgan felt that the time spent was worth it. He had fun, ate a lot of chicken and found other uses for the coupons.
“We spent about five years playing poker with Chick-fil-A coupons as our exclusive currency,” Colgan says.
But spending a lot of time to get something for free often doesn’t work out so well. For instance, the people who sell timeshare packages will often give consumers a free two- or three-day vacation in exchange for sitting in on a 90-minute presentation about the property. The hope is that the presentation will convince you to buy into the timeshare.
Many people accept the free vacation, figuring the 90 minutes spent will be well worth it. In Gary Lee’s case, he and his girlfriend were at a hotel in Cancún, and they were offered what almost felt like free money — $200 to sit in on a 90-minute presentation about a timeshare.
“It turned out to be a grueling four-hour sales pitch,” says Lee, who owns YourCityOffice.com, a company that offers physical and virtual office space. In fact, it would have been longer for them, but he and his girlfriend told the presenters that they had had enough and left.
But at least for Lee and his girlfriend, it worked out. It had been raining that day, and so they wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the outdoors. With the $200, they felt they came out OK.
It isn’t free if you’re spending money. Kathy Wertheim, a fundraising consultant who lives in Ventura, California, says that a while back, probably in the early 2000s, Ben & Jerry’s had a promotion to get a free T-shirt if you submitted lids from 10 different pints of their ice cream.
“Now, this might have been a good idea if I had a large family, but I was single,” Wertheim says.
She bought her 10 pints — not all at once — and slowly but surely made her way through all of them.
By the time she was done, and she had spent what she estimates was about $42, she submitted her 10 lids. Time passed. No T-shirt arrived.
“I had to write them and ask for it,” Wertheim says.
She wore the T-shirt until there were holes in it. But looking back on it, Wertheim says, she had plenty of T-shirts and isn’t a fan of wearing T-shirts with logos. And yet she was enticed by that word: free. “How stupid is that?” she asks.
Even worse than the money spent, Wertheim says that she hadn’t really thought about the calories she was consuming.
“That was 4 pounds that I put on and never took off,” Wertheim says.
It isn’t free if you’re spending time and money. You really have to ask yourself if what you’re about to get for free is worth it, if it entails spending a lot of hours and cash to get whatever you’re about to get.
About a decade ago, Geoff Hoesch was waiting tables in Key West, Florida, and in his spare time, he was often surfing the Internet, looking for free offers to supplement his income. Hoesch recalls finding a company with a free offer that really excited him.
All he had to do was sign up for a number of services, and he would receive free things. In his case, he was going to get a laptop computer worth about $700 and a high-quality single-lens reflex camera worth about $650.
Hoesch, who now owns Dragonfly SEO, a search engine optimization company based in Baltimore, at the time needed a laptop but not a camera. He quickly fell in love with the idea of getting the two items for free, however.
“It was the perfect plan. I’d use the computer and sell off the camera for a sweet profit,” Hoesch says.
Only it didn’t quite work out that way. Hoesch bought hair products, a Netflix membership and signed up for DirecTV, receiving a satellite dish in the mail. He canceled the service a month later, “for a loss of about 200 dollars,” he says. But he didn’t care. “No big deal,” he says. “I was going to have plenty of free stuff soon.”
Days later, the laptop came, and Hoesch set it up and all was well. But weeks passed, and the camera never arrived.
“So I called and inquired, and they said I’d already signed up for the program some months back and was already a member and was only eligible for one item because I was not a new member,” Hoesch says.
Hoesch studied the fine print and determined that he really was owed a camera, and after a conversation with the Better Business Bureau, the business evidently decided that this was becoming more trouble than it was worth. A few weeks later, Hoesch received his free camera.
He should have quit while he was ahead. Instead, he listed the camera on eBay. He sold it to someone in the Czech Republic, and after getting his money via PayPal, he shipped it to the buyer. Two days later, PayPal took Hoesch’s money back.
“They can do that, apparently,” Hoesch says, and that’s when he learned that the camera he mailed to the Czech Republic had been purchased with a stolen credit card. Hoesch, of course, never saw his camera again.
While many people would probably feel that the hassle didn’t justify the outcome, Hoesch did end up with a laptop. The money he spent to get it — the $200 to cancel satellite TV — was at least less than he would have paid to buy a new laptop.
Says Hoesch: “All things considered, it was worth it.”
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The Hidden Costs of Free Trials originally appeared on usnews.com
