The Final Straw
Ken Rigsby calculates the cost of freebies
They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but I know that can’t be true because just before Christmas, coincidentally at around lunchtime, I was passing my local Pizza Express. There, in the window, I saw a poster offering ‘Free Snowball Dough Balls’. All I had to do was head inside, holler “Free Snowball Dough Balls” to a staff member and I’d walk out with free Snowball Dough Balls. And do you know what? It worked!
The only catch was that the event was being staged for charity, so the waiter suggested I throw a few coppers into his collection bucket. Admittedly, the grump inside my head began to say: “Well, charity begins at home, so...” but then the Christmas spirit got the better of me and I dropped a shiny 20p piece in the pot. So I acquired my box of steaming, cinnamon-dusted treats for a price that is almost as good as free.
However, while Pizza Express might be generous enough to enlarge my waist with its genuine annual giveaway, there are many other ‘freebies’ that are nothing of the sort – particularly in the world of technology. Take free Wi-fi, for example. In a first for this column, my ire was inspired by a reader’s own annoyance – John Hills. He wondered whether I shared his dismay about how the word ‘free’ is used and abused. And I do.
Take offers of ‘free Wi-fi’, available everywhere from high-street coffee shops and hotel chains to the backs of taxis and coaches. All you have to do is supply your name, address, marital status, income level, shoe size and first-born’s birth certificate. In exchange, you’ll get a few minutes online while you sup your overpriced hot beverage.
Or perhaps you’ll spend your cab ride using Google Maps to figure out why the driver seems to have a knack for finding the longest traffic jams, while his meter merrily ticks over. But at least you got some free Wi-fi! Of course, the very next day your inbox will be weighed down with marketing spam, because that was the hidden cost of the deal.
Another example is free apps. Have you noticed that it’s now virtually impossible to pay for a smartphone or tablet app? You just can’t move online for supposedly free apps. But these giveaways are littered with little catch-you-outs designed to… catch you out. Tap the wrong button at just the wrong time – which from the perspective of the crafty developer, was just the right button at just the right time – and you’ll end up with 1,000 ‘free’ in-game coins or the like. That’ll be 1,000 free coins supplied in a virtual wallet priced in the very small print at £79.99, give or take. Well, okay, it’ll most likely be your kids or grandchildren that fall for these shady practices, but this isn’t a joke.
In fact, it’s for just this kind of behaviour that Amazon was recently ordered by a US federal judge to pay $26.5m in damages, because it was making it too easy for unscrupulous developers to fool kids into making in-app purchases in many popular ‘free’ games. The firm was also told to issue refunds to disgruntled parents who between them found they’d been charged upwards of $86m (about £68m at time of writing, but who knows at time of reading) by kids using these apps. You can read the whole sorry story (for free!) at www.snipca.com/22701.
So there you have it. The cost of ‘free’ to the likes of normal people like you and me is $86m, while Amazon gets a rap over the knuckles equivalent to around 0.007 per cent of its approximate $350bn market worth. That, many would agree, is as good as scot-free!
To get free Wi-fi just provide your name, address, marital status, shoe size and firstborn’s birth certificate