Lol! I finally deposited a rebate check from GEICO I got a long time ago. It turned out to be TOO long go, Wells Fargo charged me a $25 check return fee :mad:
I won second prize in a command raffle when I was in the Navy. The prize was an AM-FM radio. It was quite likely the cheapest fucking radio they could find in the PX, and didn’t even have a tape player. It broke after a month. On the plus side, I had only purchased one ticket for a buck.
I won a Reed Crandall card. I don’t remember why.
I didn’t actually win it, but first prize in a spelling bee I participated in when I was a child was a dictionary. It always seemed to me that anybody who was good enough to win a spelling bee probably already had one of those sitting around, you know? For coming in second, I got a really nifty book of puzzles and brainteasers. If I had known what the prizes were ahead of time, I wouldn’t have even made an attempt trying to spell the word that I lost on! I would totally have taken a D-I-V-E.
At least the prize made sense.
In grade school I won an academic achievement award. The prize was a new baseball.
The principal was also coach of multiple team sports, and his priorities may have been slightly out of whack.
My former dance teacher spent a couple of years living in England and dancing and training. At one of the weekend circuit competitions, they won, and received for their win, a toilet plunger.
:eek: :rolleyes:
One of my friends is a social worker at a local senior center, and she took a picture of a flyer on the bulletin board and posted it to Facebook. It was for “Dirty Bingo” - called this because the prizes were all going to be cleaning supplies.
This would probably be very useful for the ones who are low-income.
Women’s clothes. I’m a guy.
My husband deals in music memorabilia. Some years ago, he was contacted by a woman who was looking for some of the more collectible items–not Holy Grail type stuff, but definitely at the higher end of what he would be selling. She explained that a radio station was having a scavenger hunt, and whoever collected all the items on the list first would win a trip to Hawaii. She was a collector, and between what she already owned and what my husband and a couple of other dealers could provide, she would be able to complete the list. It was going to cost her, though, and my husband suggested they go over the fine print…just to be sure.
That’s when she realized that all items would become the property of the radio station. The combined market value of the memorabilia was more than the cash value of the prize. Needless to say, she changed her mind about entering.
Once I won a giant tub of popcorn as a door prize at a movie.
Another time I won a bag of groceries as a door prize. The bag included a can of dog food. I didn’t have a dog. I got one. (Did not want that can of Alpo to go to waste.) So that prize was really not so lame.
You won the re-sale value of a brand new Chevy? How is that lame 
Mine was more underwhelming than being a plain terrible prize like everyone else’s (though it’s a little similar to the people who won cars but couldn’t pay for them)
To put it in perspective if you look up past Taco Bell Grand Prize winners you see contests with prizes such as
- Free Taco Bell For A Year ($500 in gift cards)
- $2,500 check
- Round trip tickets to an NBA Finals Game ($2,500 value)
- A Brand New Car ($50,000 value)
- $1,000 Taco Bell gift card
- PS4 with headset and three games ($550)
- Gaming Prize Pack ($680 value)
- All Expenses paid trip to Taco Bell HQ ($2,000 value)
Ours was a Grand Prize worth supposedly $250 which was already a stretch, nobody pays full price for tickets to Six Flags since they have sales going on all the time. $100 would have gotten a family to Six Flags during that time easily.
Once I called into a jazz radio station because I knew that the tune they were playing was Miles Davis playing “Straight No Chaser.” I won a baseball-style cap that said “Black History Month.” I am not black, and that doesn’t mean I can’t care about Black History Month, but I never wore the hat.
When I was 8 years old, I won a “Fish Horn” at a church raffle.
It was a white plastic box with a spring on top. The idea was to attach your fishing line to the spring, and when the spring bent, it made a loud annoying buzzing noise.
I thought it was the lamest prize ever, and it was, until I started hiding it all over the house and attaching it to random things and annoying the crap out of my parents and little sister.
And now I see that I made nearly the same post 10 years ago.
I thought I remembered typing this before.
My wife and I “won” a free stay at a resort in the Bahamas. It was a door prize to try to get us to sit through a sales pitch for some overpriced shit. They suckered us into sitting through it after we “won”. We won a “stay”, not a “trip”. The rooming was free, but we had to pay for plane tickets.
But… we had to use the promoter’s travel agency to book the tickets and pay whatever rate they quoted us. Otherwise the stay was null and void.
But before we could do that… we had to submit a list of three alternate dates, at least 8 weeks away, but no more than 9 months away, and the alternate dates needed to be at least 14 days apart, and we had to arrive on a Tuesday or Wednesday.
And… the list had to be submitted via first-class mail. No email. No fax. No phone calls.
After 4 rounds of back-and-forth with submitting lists and getting them rejected for not crossing every T and dotting every I, we said “fuck it” and gave up. Even though all we lost was 45 minutes of our lives at the pitch, I still felt ripped off.
When I golfed, lots of club get-togethers featured prizes that were clearly left-over samples from clients or promoters. Not all of them were bad (I still have a rather nice towel that was a printer’s sample), but some were pretty lame (like the DVD of “Americana” which was just meant for store displays of TVs).
The worst ‘prize’ was a box of T-shirts that were the wrong size and not very good quality. They did at least have the best brand name: L’homos.
It was lame because we couldn’t keep it. It was 1952, btw.
Yeah but that’s not the prize-giver’s fault, and presumably it sold for a tidy sum?
Per a Google search, the original price of a 1952 4-dr sedan was $1,670 so, assuming we ate the depreciation, Dad probably got about $1200, minus taxes.