The first time I came to Singapore, I was surprised by the number of things they gave free here. And this was especially high if you are a student....thousands of offers, discounts and thousands of flyers everywhere! I'm quite sure that this is the only place wher I've to hand out flyers to people passing by near the canteens as part of my extra curriculum work.
About a week after the university opened, there was an ECA fair held here. And every stall I went to gave me something free. As though these weren't enough, there was a huge queue for one of the stalls which gave the people a nice folder with lecture pads, pens and other stationery for just flashing your id card to them. All of us were finding all this enjoyable in the beginning, but now it gets on our nerves when somebody gives us a flyer asking us to go collect goodie bags.
But one thing to be appreciated here is that these goodie bags usually contain really interesting stuff and are really appropriate. My hostel(called halls here) gave away goodie bags last november; these were called exam goodie bags and guess what they had? Ready to eat noodles, ready to make coffee powder packets, pens, water bottle, Chinese herbal tea cans(Jia-Jia ;) ) and some flyers having numbers to contact in case you need some bread or milk etc. Innovative!!! My roomie dutifully collected one for both of us and gave it to me...."They were giving these away for free, so I thought I'll get one for you too...", she said.
Bless you!
Oh man, every event on campus gives us goodie bags. Recently there was a Student's Union Welfare Fest, where SingTel came up giving goodie bags to everyone. And hey, not just goodie bags, there were free T-Shirts(quite good ones, you know..), free muffins, free CDs and so on....and they were having umpteen number of stalls giving a lot of things away for free, just see this list!
Cotton Candy, popcorn, X-box games, free earrings, body art, tatooing, caricature drawing, bracelets, wire art, etc. etc. etc.!
Whew!
I had my own fun that day eating blue coloured cotton candy, a little bit of sweet popcorn borrowed from a friend, and even ventured to stand in the queue making free bracelts...sadly, the queue refused to move for an hour and I lost patience to stand in it. Boy, even though these things are free, they're of absolutely good quality, and that really stumps me. Rich nation, man!
Now all of us know what to use from these goodie bags and what to throw. There are usually some wierd Chinese noodles which very few of us venture to eat, and lots of coffee packets which again are usually dumped to the guy who drinks a lot of coffee.
This "free" culture is actually very interesting to observe and I've often been wanting to find out where and how people actually get these deals from. It would make a very exciting research topic for my project!
Long live Singapore's "free" culture! :)
New beginnings
3 years ago
6 comments:
Perhaps the companies there in Sing hav a good advertisement budget.
yeah, rich nation and less population... :)
Ask them to go to india and try distributing goodie bags... :)
isnt this a way of making people addictive of these goods???
Here, we literally slog out for few sponsors...then too with loads of conditions...may be the size of free supplies would be a deterrent!!!...u need to satisfy so many people...else free goodies would turn out to be Free for all
sometimes you even get free money, rather easy money.
while in UCSB, I participated in a lot of research surveys and game theory stuff. those things were really interesting and I easily made more than $20 in less than 1/2 hr :-)
try that too, nothing bad. nalla pozhuthu poakku kooda :)
thanx all....n i know, they shd go to india and give away free stuff there, then they'll never try it anymore in their lives!
saranyan, those surveys are really interesting things! but sadly, most of the time instead of paying us,they'll give us extra credit for one of our courses coz mostly those surveys will be conducted by final yr. students as part of their project. but ya, even i've earned some $8 from one such survey n i almost felt on top of the world like i'd earned some money!! ;)
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