Care for a ride?

(Hindustan Times, 5 September, 1983)

I have always admired the trading community for their ingenuity. Several are the baits they offer to hook you and make you part with your money and yet leave you with a satisfied feeling. Their sales techniques, advertisement gimmicks and various schemes 'aimed at benefiting the common man' are matchless.

Almost daily we see an advertisement announcing a Grand Sale of...Mills sarees. The layout of the ad gives you the impression that it is organized by the mills themselves. Far from it. It is by a private party. And he does manage to attract a good crowd, as I saw the other day when I went there.

Another ad displays the comparative prices of various merchandise, and gives one star-attraction item in bold letters - say, a terrycot shirting at Rs 12 per metre. If you rush to the shop to buy this, you are told, even if you an early bird, that it has just been sold out. The salesman would then persuade you to have a look at other items. Ultimately you reach home with the most unexpected items, and spend the rest of the day justifying your buy to your better half.

Whatever be the reputation of a company, not all their products will be fast moving. But the company does not rest on its laurels with the popular items. On the other hand, it directs its efforts at the non-moving products. It offers one piece of the dead stock at 50 per cent price along with the fast selling item. Thus you find yourself buying with each detergent packet, one tube of the company's mouth-burning toothpaste. If you are a manufacturing-date watcher, you will find such items either too old, or the dates cleverly mutilated.

Often government exerts pressure on the manufacturers to reduce prices. Such requests are promptly responded to. Not by reducing the prices, but by agreeing to give something free with each packet. More often than not, these 'free' items are the ones that have been denied a berth on the shop shelf. This way the manufacturer abides by the government request and disposes of his dead stock, and the government feels happy at its success. As for the consumers, we are always happy at anything given free.

There are occasions when the seller confides in you the origin of 'seconds' to convince you that you are after all not buying any inferior stuff. "It is stamped 'seconds' deliberately", he assures, "to avoid excise duty and thus allow our products to reach the common man."

The publicity industry too has its own code of conduct. You get a personalized printed letter inviting you to subscribe to their magazine. After a few abortive attempts, they make a final offer of a special gift with subscription. The gift would depend, they say, on the manner you fill up the card. A friend of mine and I decided to go for this. We filled up our cards differently to receive separate gifts. Yes, the gifts did come - both of us got copies of the same book. From the yellow colour that the pages have acquired, we could guess that the publishers had a tough time selling copies.

While many are the occasions when I have been taken for a ride, one particular experience stands out. A classified ad from a Ludhiana firm offered the 'final' remedy for bed bugs. Although I enjoyed a peaceful co-existence with bed bugs, I decided to go for this product. It arrived promptly by VPP, for Rs 10. Inside the parcel was a match-box filled with a white powder and a tiny plastic two-in-one apparatus, one end a spoon and the other a hammer. The instructions slip suggested that each time I located a bed bug, I must put a spoonful of that power on it with the spoon end, and squash the bug to death with the other end.