Currently there’s an ad running on Discovery (and probably on other cable channels) where a company is offering free CD-ROMs, supposedly because they need to clear them out and make room (for what, more CDs?) According to the ad, all you pay is $6.95 for shipping and handling. At first I thought it might all be old, outdated versions of current titles or perhaps they are obsolete titles, but they looked like current titles. One of them is a Home Depot home improvement/home planning package. Another one is for medical information, plus several others (no games, IIRC).
I don’t plan on ordering any of the titles since I don’t have any use for any of the ones they show, and if I were interested I’d feel a bit leery about ordering. Still, they make the offer sound very attractive to an unsuspecting individual, I mean, they say it’s FREE, right? Surely a company doesn’t just give away merchandise and spend thousands of dollars to advertise it nationally without there being a few strings attached. I’m just curious what sort of surprises one might get if he were to take this company up on their supposedly free offer.
Maybe they’re planning to try and sell you more CDs or to sell your address on to other people. They might be using this as a chance to send you a catalog if their job is selling mail-order CDs or related products. Do you know what the company is called? Then you might be able to find what their main business is.
$6.95 for shipping a couple of CDs doesn’t sound particularly cheap (they’re certainly covering their costs).
There are plenty of companies online offering free CDs of different sorts, as an introduction to their product range or for advertising:
$6.95 is not free. Is it $6.95 per CD? It’s long been known that e-tailers can and do try to make a profit off the s&h charges. They usually get a discount and charge extra for the “handling”, which may be quite arbitrarily based based on the value of the order. From a 2001 Ernst & Young report:
$6.95 is not free. Is it $6.95 per CD? It’s long been known that e-tailers can and do try to make a profit off the s&h charges. They usually get a discount and charge extra for the “handling”, which may be quite arbitrarily based on the value of the order. From a 2001 Ernst & Young report (http://cyberatlas.internet.com/markets/retailing/article/0,,6061_583861,00.html):
As for the CDs, they are probably overstock, outdated, or may be defective (the program has bugs), and are sold at this price for a reason.
I have bought CDs for my kids on a web site that works like this. But it’s software I really want and might have bought anyway, and even with the shipping charges it’s much cheaper than the original retail price that CompUSA or Staples was charging. I’m sure that they’re overstock because the title didn’t sell well. But my kids have spent hours with these, mostly Blues Clues.
If you find something you really want anyway it can be a good deal.
Several possibilities have been mentioned. But now there’s a new possibility. One of their purposes may be to establish a “business relationship” with people who have credit cards and are willing to purchase things over the phone. Once you’ve bought something from them, they can legally telemarket you even if you’re on a government do not call list because you now have a previous business relationship with them.
A condition of the specific offer mentioned in the OP, which I had not noticed until the third or fourth time I saw the ad, is that the buyer has to return any one CD, but gets to keep the rest. What the hell kind of sneakiness must they be up to to include that clause?
I suspect that the software offered is old versions (assuming that there are new versions available). Most likely it’s stuff that retailers couldn’t move off their shelves.
Even if there was something I wanted, there, I would worry whether the programs would run on a current operating version (XP, for instance).
This ad is being run, by the way, by the Video Professor, who has offered free, or inexpensive, training CDs for years.
I hadn’t noticed that (I’ve never paid much attention to those ads). My wag is that somewhere in the fine print it says that X dollars get charged to your credit card if you don’t return one of the CDs. They probably don’t make the return process easy. You probably need to find your own mailing container and use your own postage, etc. The hope is that a large number of people won’t go through all the trouble to return it and that they can therefore charge X dollars more to their card. They’re counting on people’s innate laziness. This also works for money back guarantees; make returning it a pain and, for low priced items, most people won’t go to the bother of returning it even if it is a piece of crap. This is just a new twist on it. I think there’s even a marketing term for this, something like “consumer inertia” or somesuch. It seems kind of sleazy to me.