There is an old saying in economics: “If you give something away for free, you will never have enough supply to meet demand”. Apparently, nobody at KFC’s marketing department has heard that old saying.
This saying was used to explain why food stores in the former Soviet Union always had long lines when in fact the stores were empty. This also could be descriptive of the dangers posed by government funded health care.
‘If you follow “to each according to his needs”, then let the individual decide their own needs – you generate infinite demand. It is the fatal flaw of socialism/Marxism. Without the market forces of production of supply motivated by profit and demand limited by the ability to pay, socialism always will turn into rationing – and rationing turns into a system of secret black market deals that undercut the official government policy and reward the corrupt or the powerful.
Enter Oprah Winfrey. Here’s the plan – have Oprah Winfrey announce “Free Chicken Meals!” to her audience, comprised mostly of women who are at home during the day watching TV – suggesting they are either mothers, retired or unemployed. Tell them to go to a web site and print off a coupon and rush to their nearest KFC to get up to 4 free 2 piece grilled chicken meals. What could possibly go wrong with that idea?
Who could possibly have foreseen the unintended consequence that people might print off 100s of coupons each using fake information – and run to every KFC they could find and request free meal after free meal? Who could possibly have anticipated that the stores would run out of chicken with lines of people waiting to get in for their free food – stretching for blocks and snarling up traffic?
KFC’s damage control “solution” to this problem is that the coupon will be replaced by a rain check, which can be mailed in to get a real coupon for a free meal (with a drink for your trouble). By processing the requests in a central location, duplicate requests to the same address can be dropped, and just the difficulty of the process will cause many people to drop the idea. Whether in the long run KFC’s grilled chicken is financially successful is yet to be seen.
The KFC logo of Colonel Sanders has been updated to make him look about 40 years younger than he really was when he founded the company. Perhaps the current management believe that there is no value in the wisdom of the experiences of the older generation.
Remember the woman who declared now that Barack Obama was president, she wasn’t going to have to pay her mortgage, and would get a free car? Welcome to the era of the Right to Free Stuff.
After writing the above, I found this thoughtful analysis which hit most of the above points, including using the phrase “unintended consequences”. Go figure.