Towels
by Philip Goutell

© 2023 Philip Goutell

I once worked for a company that sold towels, lots of them. The appeal was price: five towels for a dollar. Had the ad been big, it might have aroused suspicion. As it was, the ad was nothing more than a small coupon which first appeared in free standing inserts in Sunday newspapers - and later on egg cartons, milk cartons, and match book covers. The results were dramatic.

Our company was an old fashioned mail order house owned by two men both younger then myself, and I was quite young. The business consisted of running couponed ads for merchandise in print media. If someone was attracted by the ad and wanted to make a purchase, they wrote their name and address on the coupon and mailed it to the company address shown on the coupon along with their payment in cash, check or money order.

The owners had launched their business selling cheap jewelry, posters, and t-shirt iron-on transfers to young girls. Most of the merchandise was priced at one dollar plus thirty-five cents postage and handling. The thirty-five cents covered both the cost of merchandise (usually less than ten cents) and postage (at "bulk rate", as low as seven cents) leaving the entire dollar to go toward advertising "buys" and profit.

We were located on Madison Avenue in the heart of some pricey real estate. The owners had sublet an entire floor of the building from an advertising agency that had suffered a downturn. The space was gotten at a bargain price. Now the conference room that had once seen high powered pitches for advertising campaigns was half filled with towels and young workers were busy packing them into mailers and stuffing the addressed mailers into large mail sacks. Money was rolling in.

You might wonder why all this excitement over towels. As mentioned, price was the selling point: five towels for a dollar. But, of course, there was more to it: the little, innocuous coupon ad. The ad did describe the product accurately, at least as far as it went. The rest was filled in by the buyer's imagination. "Towels" were imagined as bath towels - or even beach towels - of plush cotton, perhaps as luxurious as those found in top hotels. A reading of the ad revealed they were not cotton. As to size, they would later be described as the size of handy-wipes.

Why the misunderstanding? All was due to the presentation. The "coupon" format for the ad was the same format used by major manufacturers introducing new products with near giveaway offers. Can you blame people for thinking this was one of those offers? Can you blame our owners for devising a clever ad to profit from a likely misunderstanding and the consumer's rapacious greed? Of course when people get fooled they get angry, partly at themselves for they realize they should have know better, and partly at the marketer who deceived them. One day an angered woman appeared at our reception desk ready to lay into the deceivers. Of course she demanded to see "someone." I watched from a distance.

She was greeted by what you might think of as our anger management team although it was a lone individual. She said her piece; he listened politely. She went on; he continued to listen. He never tried to defend the product; he never suggested she was stupid. Gradually she became quite friendly and their conversation quite pleasant.

Finally, having had her say and having been pacified, she gave some warm advice to her listener: "A nice young man like you shouldn't work for a company like this."

She walked out the door not knowing she had been talking with the owner.