A free offer that’s too free

November 13, 2009 - 1:00 PM by Brian Blum

It happens every year at this time like clockwork. I get a call from a “private number” according to my phone’s caller ID. I answer, expecting to hear a plea for funding from a new charity. Instead, it’s the Haaretz newspaper offering me a free gift: a two-week trial of the English print edition of the paper along with the International Herald Tribune.

How can I resist? Never mind the fact that virtually the entire daily and weekend Haaretz is online and I can (and do) read it regularly, and that by having the paper delivered to my door I am contributing to who knows how many extra trees that must necessarily be felled because of my greedy acceptance.

Still, growing up in a newspaper family (my father worked as a reporter for The San Francisco Examiner for 35 years), there is nothing like the feel of fresh newsprint at the breakfast table (and later in slightly less fragrant parts of the house).

We subscribed to both the morning and afternoon papers, which turned out to be somewhat of a problem as I felt compelled to clip out any and all articles of interest. Several years ago, when my parents moved to a retirement community, leaving the home in which I grew up, I had to wade through the 31 boxes of “stuff” I’d stored in my old bedroom. A majority of those boxes were filled with my obsessive newspaper snips.

My kids will never have the same “opportunity” to take scissors to paper. Within a few years, publications will be online only (you think it will take longer…bookmark this article and read it again in 2015). As a result, anything even vaguely resembling the current newspaper form factor will be consumed on a portable reading device like the large screen Amazon Kindle or the upcoming “Que” from Plastic Logic. My 31 boxes of data could fit on a generously sized disk-on-key.

When my two-week free trial of Haaretz ended this week, I waited for the inevitable follow up call. But it never came. In fact, the nice salesman who made the offer in the first place didn’t call last year, or the year before either.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the point of freebies to hook the recipient into purchasing something they really don’t’t need? Perhaps Haaretz isn’t bound by the natural laws of marketing. Is it possible that the newspaper was truly giving me a thoughtful gift out of the goodness of its icy corporate heart?

You want to know the most ironic part of the story? After two weeks, I was feeling like I might actually enjoy a daily subscription! Oh well, back to the Internet where the bytes still roam free.

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