As long as we’re on the subject of cereal box prizes, let’s go just a little ways down Memory Lane, back into the 1980s.
How do you get people to try a new cereal? Well, the advertisers of Almond Delight came up with a swell idea: offer “Free Cash in Every Box.” Consumers had a chance to find either real legal tender–$1, $5, $50, or $500–inside the box, or else a bit of foreign currency. Now if that wasn’t going to make the product fly off the shelves, what would?
They didn’t calculate for Original Sin.
Imagine our disappointment when we brought home a box of Almond Delight and found that someone had already slit it open with a box-cutter and removed whatever money was inside. We were even more disappointed when we went back to the store and found every Almond Delight box on the shelf similarly treated. Every last one of ’em had already been slit open. I need hardly add that we didn’t buy it again.
Maybe “Free Cash in Every Box” wasn’t such a good idea, after all.
The thing to remember, though, is that this was the brainchild of highly-paid professionals who supposedly knew what they were doing.
Or, as Isaiah once put it, “Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of?” (Isaiah 2:22)
I remember they did this with another cereal brand, tho I can’t remember which one. They had some foreign currency that probably wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on, but I still have to this day.
That should be I still have it to this day.
Yes, we were trying to remember what brand that was. It’ll come to me late at night, I guess.
Such a hare-brained scheme could have only sprung from the mind of MBAs working in cooperation with marketing “geniuses”. Those boxes were probably slit long before they reached the stores.
Here’s a hint, banks deal in cash and they have guards and armored cars in order to do so. Lotteries protect their scratch tickets just as zealously. 150 years ago, Wells Fargo earned their reputation for being able to transport cash safely. You can’t put money in cereal boxes and expect it to ever reached its intended destination. Not in our fallen world.