Yeah I don’t believe for a second that anyone with any knowledge of games or business would think this was a fantastic idea. Let alone have confidence enough to put a house-worth of money behind it.
I had a buddy who was collecting pop-tops “for kidney charity” or something.
I told him that they had no value, other than the scrap value of the aluminum. I showed him an article.
He hated me for that. I ruined his dream.
Never a good idea.
Obviously the OP considers his friend to be honest in this case, but lots of business negotiations start like this, and from the outside to disinterested parties it looks like two guys bluffing without even holding a pair in their hands. Like I said, it doesn’t even have to be a scam, but it’s still a stupid way to do business, and the stupidity of it should be the first disqualifying factor.
I’m sure you have that right, and I think you should continue to dissuade your friend. My father-in-law was in the toy and game manufacturing business, he had a lot of toy and game prototypes that inventors brought to him. IIRC not a one ever became a successful product, and the reasons for that are numerous and had little to nothing to do with how much fun the product was. It would have to be something extraordinarily different and unique to succeed on that basis alone.
I have a friend whose wife was saving labels from Campbells Soup cans for her church. Every square inch of their house was filled with shoeboxes full of labels. When they had collected one million of them, they actually got a van for their church.
Sure, but I’m betting that zero legit business deals go through where one party calls companies they had no prior contact with and where eventually they find someone that goes “Oh sure, that’s a great idea, how about we go halvsies on it? Write us a check and we’ll get working right away.”
You do realize that that actually is a thing, right?
People do overestimate their value, but there really are charities, including kidney charities, that accept them.
Why don’t they collect and recycle the whole aluminum can? More metal means more money.
As written in the article, whole cans are less sanitary, more difficult to store, and not always pure aluminum.
~Max
Still got to do something with the rest of the can, seems easier to just do it all in one go like we did growing up as a kid taking bags of cans to the recycling center. Each large trash bag filled with crushed cans was worth a few bucks and we’d take 10-20 at a time about once a month.
When I was growing up, the city collected from recycling bins on the curb every week. Part of the trash bill paid for this convenience, in a reversal of your experience. I’m sure many places still do so today, and I assume they have contractors sort out the few actual recyclables.
Although also, see
/off-topic
~Max
The aluminum can pull tabs thing is an urban legend that became quasi-truth as corporate donors like McDonalds decided to tap into it for publicity and goodwill. Basically, enough people believed it that McDonalds decided it would go ahead and accept them and make donations to charity, but not for anything truly special about the pull tabs.
Which posses me off, because I have an aunt who is obsessed with the idea, and so she insists on requiring guests to pull the stupid tabs off their cans before putting them in the recycling bin. It’s annoying as hell. I just want to enjoy my Coke and then… be done with the stupid thing.
I assume that the tabs are worth slightly more per pound, and they are also denser and easier to deal with.
Then there are various charitable foundations that do things that don’t necessarily make economic sense. I remember in school there were pull tab drives that had pledges to donate at certain benchmarks. I assume that they are not basing those donation on the intrinsic value of the tabs.
That brings back something I haven’t thought of in decades. There were even charities that would donate to things like children’s leukemia based on how many math problems I got right or how many pages of a book I read. It was rewarding the effort put in by those who supported a cause, not the actual value of what they did.
So, could there have been a legitimate charity drive to collect pull tabs that DrDeth’s buddy was collecting for? I find it quite plausible.
And, OTOH, if you are an adult with the ability to have a job, just about any job will pay far better than collecting pull tabs, and it would make more sense to just do that instead and donate the money.
You think that it would make more sense to take on a job with a schedule and all of the related stress and liability as opposed to spending a little or even a lot of time collecting tabs when you feel like doing it. That’s insane.
To put some numbers on it, what I’m seeing is scrap aluminum is worth about 50 cents per pound, and it takes 1200 pull tabs to equal a pound. So 100 pull tabs are worth about 4 cents. I would think the labor involved in collecting pull tabs at that rate would be better spent doing almost anything else.
People of a certain age just loved the idea of doing some quirky task for a good cause. No matter how little economic sense it made for anyone along the chain, it made folks feel like they were contributing.
And for a business it becomes a proof-of-work scheme that rate-limits their exposure to actually paying out much on a PR stunt donation pledge. e.g. It’s easy to say “We’ll donate $100 to XYZ charity for every umpteen thousand pull tabs” since the effort to collect that many pull-tabs says there’s just no way they’ll be out more than, say, $300 after all the tabs are turned in.
That’s a much riskier play in the social media era. And would really fail if people could substitute “clicks” for “pull-tabs”. But back in the day of magazines, ladies’ church groups, and 4 channels of television, a pull-tab (or whatever) drive was a great (and safe) way to increase public engagement with your message.
Sure, Due to an Urban Legend they were deluged by them, but they can be recycled , but often mailing them is more expensive than the value.
A legend this good-hearted should be true. But it’s not. And a lot of really nice people end up sadly disappointed when they eventually discover all their hard work pretty much went for naught.
Pull tabs have no special value that makes them redeemable for time on dialysis machines, or indeed which make them worth far in excess of their ordinary scrap metal recycle value.…
A million pull tabs have a recycle value of about $366 U.S. And that’s before you factor in what it costs to collect, store, and transport them to a recycling center which will pay cash for them. When you consider the time and effort it takes to collect a million of anything, it’s a wonder anyone would go to all that trouble for a mere $366. Far better to ask everyone you know for a penny in place of each pull tab they would have given you — at least then when you were done collecting your million, you’d have $10,000 to donate to your charity.
To put this in even clearer perspective, 100 pull tabs have a scrap metal value of about 3½¢.
My thought when reading this was that today most “we’ll donate $0.05 for every click” or whatever type promotions have a maximum amount to cap the damage. I didn’t have a good example, so I didn’t post anything, but just now I saw an offer from a breakfast restaurant. To celebrate Pancake Week, Snooze will be donating 100% of certain pancake purchases to World Central Kitchen, up to $35,000.
It’s also my understanding that many of these places are planning to donate the maximum amount anyway. So the promotion may be more of: We’re giving $35,000 to World Central Kitchen; please buy some pancakes to offset that. I’m not trying to say that this example, or any, are hypocritical or “cheap advertising”, just that the businesses are smart enough to limit their liability to the amount they actually intend to give.
Pull tabs were nothing compared with Betty Crocker box tops. Every proof-of-purchase would net some fraction of a cent. School PTA’s and church guilds would enlist their members in box top drives and collect literally thousands of the cardboard scraps, bundle them up and send them off to be redeemed.
I must say that Betty Crocker (and General Mills cereals IIRC) were as good as their word, and a particularly ambitious group of housewives could net their organization several hundred dollars over a year’s time.
It’s not “cheap advertising”, and there’s nothing really hypocritical about it, but it is all about PR. They could donate to a charity, and maybe some people will hear about it, but by getting customers involved, it gets more buzz. It gets people to feel good about doing something they were going to do anyway, and maybe gets a few people to come in that wouldn’t have.
When I lived in Knoxville, my ex and I had a friend, Crystal, who really wanted to get in the movie business (Crystal was about 25±). However, C had no idea how to do this, so just talked about it for the year we knew her.
And it was our fault we eventually lost her.
C got the idea, from some Entertainment Weekly or People magazine article that Wilmington, North Carolina, was becoming a great place to make films… so she was bound and determined to move there.
Which I thought preposterous. Just damned silly. I wasn’t much older than her, perhaps 5 years, but my God, Wilmington, NC? For a movie career?
So my ex and I invited her for breakfast. Was a lovely sunny Sunday day*, and I can cook a hearty breakfast, so I did all while telling her she was crazy.
And then I said: Look, if you want to get in the movie business, really get in the movie business, you can’t half-ass yourself in some nothing place like Wilmington. Or Atlanta. You have to go to Los Angeles, and failing that, NYC. That’s it. Even the people who are discovered elsewhere, end up in LA for a good chunk of time. But if this is what you really want to do, don’t play with the idea in Wilmington, work on it in Los Angeles.
Within 2 weeks she was gone. Went to LA. About 6 months later, she calls, excited: She was at a work function with Stephen Spielberg. She was just carrying notes for her boss, and her boss had time with “Steve”, as she mocked her boss. And she was going to industry parties and seeing so many famous people she couldn’t believe it.
I don’t think we ever saw Crystal after she moved, last I heard she was really leaning into her name and getting involved in the alternative scene (which is now dominated by housewives selling woo, so go figure - another opportunity for riches I missed. Hope Crystal got herself some of that woo money, lol.) while still doing movie stuff.
But, yeah, sometimes you have to be a friend and say “did you really think this one through?” And if you can offer some clear-headed alternatives, so much the better.
*leave me alone, I like how it sounds