# A modest proposal for the Straight Dope **URL:** \ **Category:** About This Message Board\ **Created:** [June 11, 2021, 3:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-modest-proposal-for-the-straight-dope/944055 "2021-06-11T15:48:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 227
**Author:** ![Cecil\_Adams](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ad7895/32.png) [@Cecil\_Adams](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cecil_Adams)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2021, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-modest-proposal-for-the-straight-dope/944055/227 "2021-06-14T20:35:43Z")
> [@hajario](#): > > Have you been paying attention? There aren’t expenses anymore. It’s totally free and you get pure profit. I bet you could sell a couple of hundred t-shirts and mugs and make at least $5 each. It would take you less than an hour to get it going. > > Dude, people have been literally begging for this. Why in the world wouldn’t you do it? Let’s think about this, **hajario**. Your idea is we sell T-shirts through Cafe Press. Looking at your linked article, we find this: _You have to be careful when setting your markup and consider the base price. If CafePress is charging $18 base price for a shirt and you throw another $10 or $15 of your own on there, your item may not sell._ So, we add a $5 profit to an $18 shirt, making the total cost to the buyer $23. We promote this super deal on our site. We’re also trying to get people to spend $30 to subscribe, so we promote that too. A few high rollers may pop for both things, but most people will pick one or the other. So basically we’re siphoning off subscription revenue, of which we get to keep 100%, and diverting it to T-shirts, where we net five bucks. You think this makes business sense? --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-modest-proposal-for-the-straight-dope/944055)._