Recently, people in Salem, Oregon started finding $100 bills in various products when they got them home. It turned out to be a radio stunt from a station that calls itself “The Bull”. The problem as I see it is three-fold:
They didn’t have permission from the stores to do this-which means that if the stores don’t publically condemn this stunt they are open to anyone putting things into packaging without first getting permission.
With or without permission this is product tampering.
I’m pretty sure making people buy something to get a prize is against radio station rules.
It might happen-this opens up the door to Pepsi reps putting their coupons in cases of Coke, and other hilarious hijinks. There is also the problem of manufacturers not wanting their products tampered with no matter what a store manager thinks is o.k.
Couldn’t find a cite, but I remember years ago that another radio station put money in books on library shelves and announced it on the air. (They didn’t have permission from the staff, of course.) The idea was to promote reading, but dozens of people showed up and started throwing books around, looking for the cash.
Why not? I mean, I let Joe come in to my house and watch TV, but that doesn’t mean I have to let everyone else in! If the manager says, “Sure” to this promotion, it doesn’t mean that the local proselytizers can swarm in en masse and start putting Chick tracts in every bag of potatoes.
(Which, in fact, I have seen. I reported it to the store manager, who threw the creep out.)
But the managers of the various stores didn’t say yes to this promotion-they didn’t know until the press release that total strangers had tampered with packaging in their stores.
I’m thinking that once word gets around, tons of homeless people will be going into the stores and opening everything that can be opened, looking for money, and probably rendering lots of stuff unfit for sale.
They hid some in cartons of eggs and didn’t expect they would be found before the eggs were purchased? I don’t know anyone who doesn’t open the carton right there at the case to check for breakage, and one store checks them for me at the register. But leaving that point aside, there are lots of ways to slip a bill into the packaging of an item without “tampering” with it or opening the sealed portion. So I think the OP sounds a bit grumpy. Though they really should have asked the store management.
The basic idea is that somebody in the future could put something in the store’s products that they really didn’t want there - let’s say PETA leaflets. And knowing they wouldn’t get permission, PETA would intentionally not ask permission beforehand. Then when the leaflets were discovered and the stores complained about having them put there without permission, PETA would say “How could we know you wanted us to ask for permission? That radio station put stuff in your products without asking permission and you didn’t complain about them. So we figured it was okay.”
Whom exactly are they making that argument to? There’s no mandatory prosecution rule. “Hey, you didn’t give the car in front of me a speeding ticket, so I figured it was okay.” Doesn’t work.
