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Why nobody ever wins the car at the mall

thehustle.co

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Re: Why nobody ever wins the car at the mall

#251

Post by god_bless_texas »

technofiend wrote: post #245
lysp wrote: post #215

About 30 years ago in Australia There was a competition at the local shopping centre. Spend $20 at any shop in the centre, show your receipt and you get a chance to win the displayed car. The chance involved folding a paper plane, and then trying to get it into the car through the sunroof. Which was only open a small crack. A friend of the family tried about 5 times over the day and never got close. They came back qu…

There's a furniture salesman here in Houston who makes heavy use of that sort of promotion. His latest if you spend $3,000 on a mattress and the Astros win the "2018 baseball final championship series" you'll be refunded the purchase price. Not sure why it's worded so formally; must be a legal thing.

Mattress Mack?

Re: Why nobody ever wins the car at the mall

#252

Post by [deleted] »

technofiend wrote: post #245
lysp wrote: post #215

About 30 years ago in Australia There was a competition at the local shopping centre. Spend $20 at any shop in the centre, show your receipt and you get a chance to win the displayed car. The chance involved folding a paper plane, and then trying to get it into the car through the sunroof. Which was only open a small crack. A friend of the family tried about 5 times over the day and never got close. They came back qu…

There's a furniture salesman here in Houston who makes heavy use of that sort of promotion. His latest if you spend $3,000 on a mattress and the Astros win the "2018 baseball final championship series" you'll be refunded the purchase price. Not sure why it's worded so formally; must be a legal thing.

[deleted]

Re: Why nobody ever wins the car at the mall

#253

Post by ben509 »

djsumdog wrote: post #147
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly sure there's federal laws that forbid that. Of course, it's not a crime if you don't get caught. Plus there's a small sub-story in the article about someone that did win a Tesla, but couldn't afford the taxes they had to pay to actually get it. You can win a car but you have to be able to pay taxes and insurance for it, too.

Some of these promotion companies pay a lot of money just to have their cars as part of promotions (and the sweepstakes companies can get into big trouble if their systems are not setup to give away x cars. Most of them are time seeded so someone is guaranteed to win one a week). If your already investing that much money, can't the company also cover the taxes, or do most states have laws forbidding that? It seems li…

You're paying income tax, not sales tax, because winnings are income. (Think about professional gamblers...)

Income taxes are progressive, of course, and then there are a mess of deductions. But they could still make an estimate by just assuming the person is in the $37K to $92K bracket. So that's 25% [1].

> It seems like bad publicity if your "winners" have to pay several thousand in sales tax to get their "prize car."

I think they make the judgement that offering a prize that is 3/4ths as expensive would be less good publicity vs. the largely unknown bad publicity that is mostly oriented towards the government anyway.

[1] ... and yeah, there's 25% on that, and 25% on that, etc.; for tax rates < 1 it's convergent, if the tax_paid = rate * (original_value + tax_paid), just solve for tax_paid.

Re: Why nobody ever wins the car at the mall

#254

Post by jonhendry18 »

mratzloff wrote: post #82
jonhendry18 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is probably a two-part form where the winner can fill in their SSN and seal it in an envelope, then the contest operator would take that envelope and enclose it with the operator's part of the form, and mail it. That way the contest operator need not ever see the winner's SSN. The amusing thing is the apparent widespread assumption that contest operators are shady as f.

"Here is a code. Please go onto the IRS website and enter this code and the relevant information, then tell me the code you get in response."

Sure, if you want to be modern.

Re: Why nobody ever wins the car at the mall

#255

Post by scandox »

god_bless_texas wrote: post #251
technofiend wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a furniture salesman here in Houston who makes heavy use of that sort of promotion. His latest if you spend $3,000 on a mattress and the Astros win the "2018 baseball final championship series" you'll be refunded the purchase price. Not sure why it's worded so formally; must be a legal thing.

Mattress Mack?

In Dublin we have Mattress Mick.

Re: Why nobody ever wins the car at the mall

#256

Post by Zetaphor »

braythwayt wrote: post #242
gregpilling wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are companies that specialize in insuring risks like that. It is a whole sub industry of insuring unlikely to win contests. https://www.holeinoneinsurance.com/how-much-does-it-cost.htm...

Way back in the day, I had a reinsurance company as a client. For those unfamiliar, reinsurance companies insure insurance companies. For example, they might insure a standard insurance company for automobile accidents, with a $1,000,000 deductible. So the retail insurance company handles payouts up to a million dollars, but when there's a really wild claim, the reinsurance company pays the insurance company for anyt…

Who insures the reinsurance company?

Re: Why nobody ever wins the car at the mall

#257

Post by rconti »

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #64

> In the course of an hour on a Wednesday afternoon, 22 hopefuls fill out the digital form. Lets take this hour to be an average hour. Over 12 hours in a day that the mall is presumably open, that's 22*12 = 264 leads. > the mall isn’t behind these giveaways; they merely rent out the advertising space (for around $1.5k per day). This would imply that these leads need to be worth at least $1500/264 = $5.68 per lead. Do…

They're not leasing the car, I'm sure. It's provided for free by the Acura dealer as advertising. The article refers to it as a "loaner" from Acura of Fremont.

It's also not inconceivable that the dealer chips in some money for the floor space as well, though I find that less likely because it probably just over-complicates things from a logistics perspective, particularly over such a small amount of money.

Re: Why nobody ever wins the car at the mall

#258

Post by strombofulous »

oconnor663 wrote: post #240
rayiner wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They came back quite drunk > They walked away with the car. Hopefully they did walk.

I believe the contest rules require you to floor it straight out of the mall (the "Left4Dead 2 clause").

What is the L4D2 clause? Google didn't return anything.

Re: Why nobody ever wins the car at the mall

#259

Post by cobbzilla »

mathattack wrote: post #229
gregpilling wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are companies that specialize in insuring risks like that. It is a whole sub industry of insuring unlikely to win contests. https://www.holeinoneinsurance.com/how-much-does-it-cost.htm...

If I recall, there was a basketball one where the insurance company didn’t want to pay because the shooter had paid college ball. The team wound up paying to avoid the PR disaster.

YES! This was at a Chicago Bulls game in the late 90's iirc. I watched the game on TV. The shot was from the free-throw line to the basket on the opposite end of the court. The guy shot one handed, wheeling his arm around wide to throw the ball with a great arc.

It took a few seconds to travel through the air, and from the moment he released the ball the crowd was silent - we could all see it was looking on-target. It went through the hoop! It barely nicked the rim on its way down, so after it went through it ricocheted hard to one side, in my memory it was a near 90-degree turn.

The crowd went wild. Everyone was thrilled to finally see someone win that prize. I don't remember how much it was, but I do remember it was a very large cash prize.

And then, like you said, the next day the prize company said they wouldn't pay because there was some stipulation that participants could not have played any pro or college basketball. Public sentiment turned harshly on the team - you see, to take away his prize would be to invalidate the joyful moment we all shared watching that shot. If he didn't win, what the heck did we just see?

I don't know if the insurance company changed their minds or if the team just ate the cost of the prize, but it didn't take long for the Bulls to realize what was the right thing to do, and do it.

Thanks for bringing back these fun memories.

Re: Why nobody ever wins the car at the mall

#260

Post by mikec3010 »

drawkbox wrote: post #47

On the flipside, I worked on promotions game systems in the brand promotions space with instant win and giveaways after the user played a game. If they won we had to contact them to verify and get info to send them the prize. When someone won the prize we had to get the social security number of the person that won for gift tracking as many were over 15k, their contact info and location to send the prize, you'd be su…

I wonder how many were social security, retirees, or welfare recipients? I think those people will lose their benefits if they declare earnings. And perhaps they just don't think about it before they enter?
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