Act Now! Free Guns & Pizza!

You Gotta Have a Gimmick.

[ELECTRA]: If you wanna make it, Twinkle while you shake it.
[TESSIE TURA]: If you wanna grind it, Wait till you've refined it.
[MAZEPPA]: If you wanna stump it, Bump it with a trumpet!
[ALL]: So get yourself a gimmick and you, too, Can be a star!

From You Gotta Have a Gimmick from the musical Gypsy

For those naysayers claiming America is in decline, I say “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet”.

We might end up selling everything we have to the Chinese (remember in the eighties people were saying the same about the Japanese?) but America will always be able to reinvent ourselves, calling on a seemingly endless fount of creativity.

Especially when it comes to marketing. Only in the land that spawned  P.T. Barnum arises this creative bent on selling:

From Hamilton, Montana one enterprising Radio Shack franchisee's brainchild was to promise a free gun with every dish network subscription. Imagine – a free gun – what’s more American than that? Yes… ACT NOW and you’ll receive your very own Hi-Point .380-caliber handgun or a 20-gauge shotgun. After all, what woman can have enough shoes and what man can own enough guns? Of course if your taste in weaponry runs elsewhere, you can have a $50 Pizza Hut gift card instead. Yum!

The point is, store owner Steve Strand knows his target customer and took a leap of faith with a promotion that would scare most proprietors (not to mention the franchisor) and it worked. Sales have tripled. Let’s just hope gun-related incidents and waistlines don’t.

For more on getting your own gimmick:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFRSawe33sA