Approved Deceptions

So you walk into a movie theater and you pay $9.00 for the flick and then $9.50 for a medium bag of popcorn and a bottled water. One admission gets you all the rides in a theme park, but a very small tube of sunscreen is $9.95. The cable TV pitchman is willing to sell you the juicer-of-all-time in 3 easy payments of $29.95 a piece. You price merchandise in your own store, and no one will ever let you sell it for an even buck multiple. It's got to be $x.95 or $x.99.

Let's take the movie flick phenomenon. The conventional wisdom is that you have no where else to buy food--you are a captive--so you have to pay through the nose for snacks. Well, first of all, I tend to look at things from the perspective of the business owner. I respect profit--and I like seeing first run movies on the big screen. It's exciting. You catch up with old friends at the show. I do believe--despite my love/hate relationship with what Hollywood produces--that the big old 14 screen luxury theaters are a service to the community, but I'm curious as to why there has to be a pricing con game built into the system. I think it's because people just won't pay $14 for a movie and market rate for snacks. They will pay $9 for a movie and then grudgingly pay more for snacks than they would pay anywhere else. It might have something to with how much people will allow to slip out of their wallet at any one time, or it may be the leverage movie producers have over the theaters that screen them. Whatever the cause, payments over time are easier to swallow--even if that balloon payment is a doozey. That explains the $9.95 sunscreen and the "three easy payment" and the penny-off-the dollar pricing convention. When we buy things, there is a delicate line between feeling served, and feeling mugged.



The strange thing about life is that this systemic, approved dishonesty is built right into the fabric of our existence. Everyone knows--Republican, Democrat, Liberal, Conservative--that the Social Security system is facing insolvency soon, that it is--in fact--a Ponzi scheme without enough new "investors" to satisfy the old ones. But there are so many retirees in this country who vote that no politician in his right mind would ever propose serious reform, if it involved sacrifice across the board. Two opposing ideas--"old people should be get what is coming to them" and "there isn't enough money"--just can't be reconciled. The reckoning is delayed, put on the installment plan, and the eventual disaster looms larger and larger. Politicians who actually want to solve the problem, like theater owners who want to make a profit, have to coax the electorate into giving them authority by pretending the price won't be very high.



Or take education: You are sitting in a class at the community college--taught by an utter buffoon whose principles you detest--but he has the power to certify you, flunk you, write recommendations, move you on or keep you back. Do you write papers which honestly state your claims or do you tow the party line and move on, fake your way into tenure, and eventually speak the hard truths after accepting so many falsehoods you don't know what you believe anymore?

And what about love? There's a field full of deception if ever there were one. You get the guy, ladies, by playing "hard to get." As my old daddy used to say "the boy chases the girl until she catches him." There's a part of our souls that wants what we can't have, so we have to pretend that we're unavailable to make certain our availability is achieved. Consider Genesis 24:

[Isaac] went out to the field one evening to meditate, and as he looked up, he saw camels approaching. Rebekah also looked up and saw Isaac. She got down from her camel and asked the servant, "Who is that man in the field coming to meet us?" "He is my master," the servant answered. So she took her veil and covered herself.

Rebecca's veil wasn't general--not a shield against every man--just the one she had agreed to marry. I imagine several thousand books have been written on the concept of the veiled, or the semi-veiled, female, but the reality is that we always value what we cover up and hide--whether it's the woman behind the dress or the secret that can't be shared or the birthday present that can't be opened yet, or the glowing joy of movie popcorn and compelling cinema, hidden behind the $7.00 matinee teaser price.



A few years ago, I was a real bear about charging for parking on busy fall harvest days. In my mind, it was an utterly reasonable charge. We have to keep the place safe; we have to keep the traffic moving, make sure an ambulance could have access in the event of an emergency; we also needed to save up for eventual hard surfacing of our roads and parking lots. It made sense to charge for parking, but lots of newcomers to the farm had no idea what they were getting. Why should they pay for parking in a farm field? We stopped charging for parking and our food business went way up. Conventional wisdom would indicate we charge more for food to make up for the parking loss, but the idea of a $12.95 hamburger turns my stomach. The $12.95 hamburger, in our case, pays for the guy who won't pay for parking, no matter how reasonable the charge, and the family that won't buy food from our restaurants--and who picnic on the farm, using our bathrooms and trash containers along the way. I think one of the reasons I hate price-gouging on food is that it seems to be a different version of what our federal and state government does: they penalize those who work, to pay extortion, and give make-work jobs, to those who won't.

But who, really, wants to be the picnic-Scrooge? Who wants to stand around and read farm journal entries to customers who don't--or won't--understand? If a theater owner wanted to give honest, market-priced snacks and have his customers pay $15 for the movie, would an empty parking lot console him for being truthful? Imagine if he stood out on the sidewalk and said, "look folks, it's Brad Pitt who charges $5 million an appearance, not the farmer who raised the pop-corn; we're just trying to be honest about what you're paying for." Would that work?



Probably not. I'm not a saint on this score, by the way. There's a part of me that would rather not know what it costs to take six children to a movie--with snacks.



"Please," my inner voice counsels. "Don't add it up. Just enjoy the show."



I'm still not going to charge $12.95 for a hamburger, but if you picnic on Riley's Farm, without buying anything else, I will throw in a farm journal entry, read out loud, absolutely free.