Free?!

After reading Predictably Irrational, I have become fascinated with the concept of FREE. I often find myself being caught by the trap and was very interested in the possible reasons I can’t help but take nearly every free thing I lay my eyes on. I realize I am not alone in this practice but it still fascinates me how much impact something free really does have. I have seen people wait in lines for hours for “Free” things. There is something special about getting something and giving nothing in return. We are so used to having to pay for everything that when we see a small gadget that we will never use with a free sign we simply have to have it. All these free things pile up somewhere in a closet and eventually we throw them away without ever using almost all of them. Most of us even recognize this before we take it but in the end we wind up with the free things anyway. Is all this stuff truly free? At the last career fair I decided at the beginning to only take one specific item. I was not there to get free things to fill up a shelf in my closet; I was there to try to find an internship. So while I was walking around looking for employers that caught my attention, I found the item I was after. As a photographer I am constantly transferring photos from one computer to another and again to another. During this process many of my flash drives have managed to vanish into thin air. Add to that the others that have somehow managed to stop working, and I find myself replacing them more than I should be. For some reason over the past few semesters the number of companies with free flash drives at their booths has greatly increased. At the end of the spring career fair I found myself with 5 new flash drives! I could have purchased 5 of them of similar quality and size for probably less than $5, but because they were free I feel I gained more value than I would have if I had paid for them. I often wonder how much benefit comes from me taking a flash drive with some random company’s logo on it. The career fair is supposed to attract people looking for opportunities, not for trinkets. It seems odd that the companies have to spend money on these little items to give away at a booth when they have lines several people long begging to get a chance to interview with them. Take Boeing for example, they hire from MSU every year, have a strong reputation in the community, are very well known, and still give away free things. I wonder how many people have ended up finding a job because they saw something cool on a table and went to grab it and ended up starting a conversation with the person at the booth. In the future I plan to create some sort of experiment to test this thought. Free things are never free for everyone.