Posted on 10/01/2014 8:49:58 AM PDT by C19fan
In 2010, a Minnesotan named Erwin Lingitz was arrested in a Supervalu grocery store after spending an excessive amount of time at the deli counter. In the words of a Supervalu spokesperson, Lingitz had violated “societal norms and common customer understanding regarding free-sample practices.” While the charges were later dropped, the evidence remains incriminating: After a search, Lingitz was found to have stored in his pockets about a dozen soy sauce packets and “1.46 pounds of summer sausage and beef stick samples.”
Lingitz may have gotten carried away, but his impulse is more or less universal. People love free, people love food, and thus, people love free food. Retailers, too, have their own reasons to love sampling, from the financial (samples have boosted sales in some cases by as much as 2,000 percent) to the behavioral (they can sway people to habitually buy things that they never used to purchase).
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
It works on me. I’ve tried things that I normally wouldn’t have taken a chance on buying and liked it enough to by it ... again and again. They’ve made more money on me than they have lost on samples.
I’ve also tried things and ... yuck! One time a sampler server tried to warn me beforehand about how awful the product was (in a subtle way) but I tried it anyway. Seeing my screwed up face she just said “I know, I feel bad serving this”.
You’d have to fight me off first!
It’s actually pretty easy to pick up 3-4 toothpicks at a time.
One time I was at a COSTCO and there was an unattended box of truffles for sampling. I kept walking away and then going back, and before I knew it, I had eaten the whole box! I was ashamed, but I just couldn’t help myself.
When my mom was still alive she and her cousin would go to Costco for ‘lunch’. lol The cousin used to work there.
I never take samples of food....regardless of what it is and where it is. I will cut a huge swath around them to avoid them. Just me.
Thanks for a good laugh!
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