Thursday, November 30, 2006

More Free Give Aways Lead to Trouble

A shopping mall in California gave away free gift certificates. They were in balloons that were dropped. The only problem is that 2,000 people showed up for 500 gift certificates. Nine people received minor wounds and an elderly woman went to the hospital as result of the stampede to get the balloons once they were dropped.

Any time the price of a good is 0, you won't have enough to go around and some other way of allocating the good will take place. In this case, people who could move the fastest and knock other people down got the goods.

You can read about this at this site

2 comments:

champ said...

do you think if all of us were wealthy to some extent, there would be no reason to participate in said activities?

Cyril Morong said...

The more valuable your time, the less likely you are to wait in line for something free or below the equilibrium price. The wealthier you are, the less likely you are to want or need a free gift certificate. My guess is that very few of the people who went to the mall to try to get the gift certificate were wealthy.