I see potential for a comedy routine, say an episode of a sitcom or so, here: Someone gets a super rare property and only needs to find a super common other property to complete the set and win the prize, but whatever they do, they don’t manage to get that common one. It’d be a bit like that plotline in the Peanuts when Charlie Brown frantically tries to get a Joe Shlabotnik baseball card.
Will this be the rare episode where Lucy does not pull the football away? Which episode is then memory-holed by Big Shulz so everyone on Earth had exactly one chance to see it? Or to miss it, and forever wonder at what might have been.
Wayyyy back in the 70s, I habitually hung out at a pool hall on the way home from school. One of the soda companies had a promotion with numbers under the bottle cap (yeah, bottles were still more common than cans!). If you got the exact number of miles from (I think) Halifax, NS to Vancouver, BC, you’d win. Because the bottle opener was attached to the cooler, most people just popped the cap and it would fall into an internal bin. I got permission to (or maybe didn’t, but in any case would) empty the bin, and collected the caps.
The target number was something like 2767 (I just got that from Google now). The numbers on the caps were all multiples of 50. Finally one day I got a 17 or 67, sent it in, got back a coupon for two cases of Coke (which I didn’t drink) and a big box containing a cooler. I felt kinda cheated: the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze! But I did use that cooler for a decade or two.
Or (even better for the restaurant) a free fry, frosty, or drink with the purchase of a premium sandwich.
Just to clarify: Did you send it only the 17 (or 67, as the case may be), or the entire set making up the 2767? If the former, then that’d be an admission that, effectively, the super rare cap would be the winning ticket all by itself, without all that hassle about “collecting” caps - much like McDonald’s handing out the main prize in exchange for Boardwalk alone, without having to (also) get hold of Park Place.
The entire set. At the age of ?15? it wouldn’t have occurred to me to try that, plus I suspect they’d use it as an excuse to disqualify the win anyway.
They probably couldn’t. They’re legally required to publish the accurate odds, and they only way to calculate the odds is the odds of the rare piece without all of the commons, because even though the commons are, well, common, they can’t actually guarantee that the winner of the rare piece will also have them.
In the mid '90s, Gatorade had a promotion where the bottle caps would say something like “Lakers in 6 games.” The gist of the contest was that you would save all your caps until the NBA finals were over, and if the Lakers did indeed win the NBA finals in 6 games (i.e., four wins and two losses in the finals), you would submit the cap and win a prize. I never did have a winning cap, but it was possible to see what the cap said even before opening it. (At least you could see the team’s logo, even if you couldn’t read the number of games required.)
Wait, there had to be more to it than that–aren’t there only eight possible outcomes (team A in 4/5/6/7 and same for Team B)? Or did you have to wind up with the whole playoff matrix? Or were the prizes another bottle of Gatorade??
I think Snapple also did a game once where it was possible to see the underside of the cap but tilting the bottle. They then switched to a covering over the prize sticker.
I would wonder about the brain power of the people who came up with this and other corporate idiocies but there’s only 24 hours in a day.
There were 28 or so NBA teams at the time (30 is the current number). So there were 112 possibilities. Even the bottom-feeder teams that missed the playoffs were represented. (Unfortunately the Lakers were usually one of those teams in those days.)
Very very few customers give a shit and they get more sales from the few people who think that they are being clever by figuring out a system to get a free bottle of sugar water.
Even 112 isn’t, like, a lot?! Since Gatorade didn’t know who was going to win, they could hardly just print one winner.
Rounding 112 to 100 for simplicity, that would mean 1% of all caps they printed would be winners.
But what percentage of all caps would be saved all season? Remember the NBA season lasts nearly an entire year. My bet is less than 1 in 1000. The vast majority of consumers don’t notice or participate in these sorts of retail promotions.
So the actual risk they were running was needing to pay out on 1 in 100,000 caps they printed. If the prize is trivial enough, that could easily be a money maker.
Now for sure as the season progresses the caps for teams in the hunt might begin to be preferentially saved.
Another thing to remember is that nowadays with social media, if there’s an angle to be had, the whole damned country knows about it. And FOMO drives lots of people to participate in stuff they might have said “Meh” to before. Before ~2005 that was vastly less true. Far fewer people would even know there was a Gatorade promo, or that this particular list of teams were worth collecting and saving, etc.
It is the same general idea as scratch-and-win tickets and one-armed bandits. Anything that attracts the suckers’ money. Just avoid making the winning pieces identifiable without buying it.
Also, even before the season started, anyone who follows sports would know at least roughly the relative strengths of the teams. They could very easily have made the good teams rarer and the bad teams more common. Which still leaves them exposed to the risk of a Cinderella team causing them to pay out more than expected, but companies running unpredictable promotions often get insurance for just such situations as that.
No, it wasn’t just that one time. He was sent like a whole sheet or package of the seals, so he had a lot of them. Since he only needed one seal per contest, and since they apparently never changed the type of seals they used, that allowed him to keep scamming everyone for years.
The rare street is always the last alphabetically (with one exception).
Example: “Yellow”. You have Marvin Gardens, Ventnor, and Atlantic Ave. Alphabetize them and Ventnor is last. That’s the rare one.
The only exception to that is that Boardwalk is rarer than Park Place.
I’ve always wondered how they avoid the valuable prize items being lost to routine spoilage and misdirection. If there are say, only five golden tickets that get you some fabulous prize if you find them on your Big Gulp cup, how does the company avoid having some or all of them never reach the hands of a customer? The cup with the prize winner gets accidentally smashed during stocking and thrown away, ends up in a case that’s shuffled to the back of the storeroom and forgotten, or falls behind the drink machine?
Or it goes to someone who doesn’t care about the contest and just throws it away?
Do they have people who slip the prize winner into the retail stock and then hover around it until someone finds it? Doesn’t seem they could do that and call it random, but otherwise there seems a risk they never get to promote big contest winners.
I’m pretty sure some of the prizes are never won through the regular process. These games may have a second chance drawing.