Trash Bag Roulette
Sometime around about 1987, a strange consumer mania possessed my father. It gripped him for about three months, during which we watched him progress from interested to enthralled to nearly unhinged. And then just as quickly, it was gone.
You must know first that Dad is a good and successful man, one who dedicated his life to the improvement of public education, particular for kids who schools have tended to put in a too-hard basket. He led school districts with tens of thousands of kids, and I’m proud that he embodied generosity and determination, even courage in the course of his career.
Unusually for an educator, he also has a strong risk-taking streak, which found its outlet in trips to Vegas blackjack tables, as well as a range of entrepreneurial ventures. These were invariably successful to begin with, but grew too fast, were too highly leveraged, with predictably unhappy conclusions.
Dad’s three great passions outside of work are musical theatre, gambling, and airline miles.
The first two of these are conventional enough. But the airline miles for him was less a hobby than a spiritual experience. Dad used to know which flight legs were likely to be overbooked, and he would book those legs with no intention of actually travelling. Instead, he would show up at the airport hours early to be the first one to volunteer to be bumped, collect his free flight voucher and extra cash “for his trouble”, and drive right back home. This was Dad’s idea of a good time.
Once, in this glorious era before airline security or computer data matching were really a thing, he booked 13 of his friends and family from Wichita to Baltimore – all under the name (and the frequent flyer account) of S Berger. He checked in thirteen times, each at a different counter, gave us all our boarding passes, and off we went, while he collected all the miles. I had a girlfriend once from Germany, and when she flew to the US the first time without registering for frequent flier miles, Dad was apoplectic. He couldn’t get over it, although he did chuckle when I ascribed the error to an intercultural misunderstanding.
He once threatened to write a book called “The Art of the Bump”, and I wish he had. Maybe he’d be President today instead of Mr Trump.
Anyway, this brings me back to 1987, when the Hefty Trash Bag company found a way to combine my Dad’s passion for airline miles and gambling.
You see, Hefty started a marketing campaign advertising free miles inside every box of trash bags. The genius bit was that you didn’t know how many miles until you opened the box and looked at the voucher inside. It could be 100 or 500 or – jackpot – 10,000 free airline miles.
Dad wasn’t going to rest until he scored the 10,000 free miles ticket. At first, it was just one box of trash bags every time he went to the store. Way more trash bags than we needed, but he had some plausible deniability at first. “Oh, I forgot we already had some.” “Just in case we run out.” “Oh, that’s right, we keep them in the garage, I was looking under the sink.”
Eventually, he dropped the pretense. He would come home with three boxes, four boxes… six boxes. Not just when he was shopping for milk and eggs, either. It was just the trash bags. He would open them all just for the flight miles voucher, like a kid in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory after the golden ticket. (Only I guess the movie wouldn’t have been as compelling if the prize was a trip to the Hefty factory and a lifetime supply of plastic bags.) The open but full boxes of trash bags stacked higher and higher in our garage.
In the pre-internet era, he had to collect the flight miles vouchers and redeem them through the post. The vouchers went in an envelope, with a letter that he penned by hand at his old-fashioned executive desk in the den – “Dear Sir/Madam, please find enclosed…” Weeks later, they would show up on his monthly frequent flier account statement, which also arrived in the post and was cause for close scrutiny and general jubilation.
It was a sad day for Dad, though I’m sure a relief for my mother, when this promotion ended. We had far more than a lifetime supply of trash bags.
There is some obvious, dull commentary I could confect here about marketing and capitalism and consumerism and addictive behaviour. The wackiness of connecting garbage bags and airline flights. The irony of human systems that drill for petroleum, turn it into garbage bags, allow a guy in Wichita Kansas to trade those bits of processed petroleum for the entitlement to burn yet more fossil fuels flying to Seattle and Cleveland, and then dump most of the bags unused into landfill.
But no. What I love most about this story is not some forced finger-wagging about the economic forces at work. It is the sheer joy my Dad took in doing this, in taking it to an unreasonable, exuberant and hilarious extreme.
Could the marketing flacks – stuck in their cubicles working on the Hefty account, wondering where exactly they took a wrong life turn – ever have imagined that their promotion would deliver such outsized happiness to my Dad? I wish I could thank them for this precious gift!
Actually, far from condemning the marketing or the capitalism, I’m not even sure whether Hefty was taking advantage of Dad, or the other way around. Had they really calculated out and priced in the cost of the free miles – or were they relying on bringing in new long-term customers for marketing to hit their target ROI? Dad was an outlier, but was he the outlier who they won big on, or lost big on? No idea. Just part of the overall koan here.
Human interactions with economic institutions are so deeply idiosyncratic. We’re not rational, never have been. Our collective behavior might mimic that of “economically rational actors” in the aggregate – but we can’t mistake that for the weird, subjective and sometimes downright pathological ways that we as individuals navigate that huge set of relationships we call the economy.
The subjective nature of economic experience is one of the themes I hope to return to in this occasional blog. There are others – good and bad design in economic systems, the fuzziness of value and wellbeing…
And perhaps most of all, the importance of giving things their proper name. And in that vein, this blog will be titled, in honour of my Dad, the best name I can think of to describe his endearing fixation on frequent flier miles.
Reader: welcome to Trash Bag Roulette!
