Or woman. Whoever is in charge of coming up with promotions needs to be replaced. This isn’t the first time I’ve written about Papa Johns, and I suspect it won’t be the last. Here’s their latest batch of WTF:

You’ve probably spotted the problem, but I still feel compelled to point it out. Numbers 1, 3 and 4 are exactly the same offer. How about a few more specials? Four large pizzas for $40? Five large pizzas for $50? Why stop there? Clearly they think we’re dumb enough to go along with this, so how about THE BEST VALUE: 10 Large Pizzas for $100! Amazing! What a deal!!!

Part of the premise of my We Were Not Born Yesterday posts is the realization that some people or companies are dishonest. Noting the dishonesty, be it here or at other blogs or publications, says to those people or companies, “Hey. We know what you’re doing. We’re not stupid.”

Too often though, we are lied to and we accept the lie.

Two days ago, I picked up my new iPhone 4. I “bought” it from Radio Shack for the excellent price of zero dollars and zero cents. In fact, they gave me $20 on top of that price, to be used toward AppleCare or an accessory of my choice. The reason the phone was free? Radio Shack is running a deal (through this month) wherein customers may trade in their iPhone 3GS for a $200 gift card, which can then be used toward the purchase of an iPhone 4. Since I wanted the $199 16GB iPhone 4, my “purchase” was a wash. I’m mentioning that so I can mention this: in the course of my conversation with the guy at The Shack (branding #fail, but that’s for another post), he commented that the reason the phone was only $199 was that AT&T was subsidizing the unit with a 2-year contract.

Of course, you’ve heard that before. It’s a fact of life with cell phones – or rather, cell phones that don’t suck. The phone is normally $5,000 (or $599, something like that) and the carrier is knocking a bunch of money off the top which you’ll pay back over the life of the contract.

That’s a lie.

Does the carrier pay – in this instance – Apple the difference between what I paid and what Apple charges? Sure. Yes, technically, AT&T is fronting some of the bill. The difference between what Apple charges ($599) and the $199 I would have paid were it not for Radio Shack, is $400. The contract length is two years. Subsidy per month? $16.67.

Logically, if I were to stay with AT&T past the two-year contract, my monthly plan should go down by $16.67. After all, I’ve paid back the “loan” that AT&T gave me (which is what it would be defined as, if they gave me money upfront that I was paying back over time).

More importantly, if I were to buy a phone unsubsidized and bring it to AT&T, they should hook me up with a plan that’s $16.67 per month less than they normally charge.

Neither of those situations is reality. AT&T charges every customer the same rate plan as every other customer. If there is no difference in the monthly charge between someone who bought a subsidized phone and someone who didn’t, and if the monthly bill doesn’t go down after paying back the $400 difference, then AT&T cannot claim that unit subsidies are built into the monthly price. AT&T isn’t subsidizing anything. It’s a lie. QED.

I, for one, will stop perpetrating the myth that the carriers are subsidizing the phones. Who’s with me?

Maybe you’ve seen the ads on TV or heard them on the radio or seen them in magazines. Discover Card would like you to know that you can earn 5% cash back in certain categories (currently, Restaurants) when you pay using your Discover card. Everything else, you earn 1% cash back. Coming up in July, it’s even better – the 5% cash back applies to purchases made in the Gas Stations, Hotels, Movies and Theme Parks categories. Sounds awesome!

But we were not born yesterday. We read the fine print, don’t we?

* Earn 5% Cashback Bonus for gas (at stand alone gas stations), hotel stays, movies and admission to theme parks from 7/1/10 (or the date on which you signed up, whichever is later) through 9/30/10, subject to a cap of $300 in purchases.

It’s that last bit that interests me. What is 5% of the “cap of $300 in purchases”? Fifteen bucks. Sure, that’s better than the three dollars that you normally earn under the 1% plan, and I’m not one to complain about getting cash back on things I’m going to buy anyway. What bothers me is that in all of the advertising for their 5% deals, Discover never mentions up front that there’s a pathetically low cap. I can just imagine the number of people that see that ad and think, “hey, I spend $1,000 a month on hotels alone because I travel a lot, and since I drive, I spend another thousand on gas! I could probably rack up a hundred bucks or more in cash back, just on those two categories!”

No, you can’t.

Can you imagine how ridiculous it would sound if the voiceover in Discover’s TV ad told the truth, out loud? “Earn up to $15 cash back on the things you buy anyway, subject to terms and conditions.” Who would rush out to sign up for a new Discover card?

That, I suppose, is exactly why companies feel they need to trick us by playing with the numbers and using fine print shenanigans.

Words have meaning. We’ve all agreed to them, so let’s try to use them correctly.

Papa Johns.
Fourth from the left, third from the right.
Unlimited toppings on any large pizza (up to 7 toppings).

Unless “unlimited” means something completely different than what everyone agreed upon, having a maximum of seven toppings on the pizza makes it pretty damn limited.

Incidentally, not only do they limit the toppings on their unlimited toppings pizza, they also disable extra cheese as a topping when ordering this special.

Do they really think we don’t notice this stuff?

Spam exists in the really real world, too.

In case the image is too small or too fuzzy (sorry about that), this is what it says in all of its spammy glory:

The front of the postcard was empty with the exception of a mailing label and stamp. No logos or anything. The creepy part is that I share a surname with the person on the address sticker shown here.

Late night infomercials will provide many, many entries for We Were Not Born Yesterday, I’m sure. Let’s start with this one:

It’s SANDPAPER.

This new feature kicks off with an item that is so blatantly ridiculous that you can’t help but wonder if they’re trying to be serious or not. Wendy’s has a new campaign that’s been running for a few weeks now:

Way better than fast food? I speak’a da English pretty good, and what this says to me is that Wendy’s wants us to start believing that they aren’t a fast food chain. “We’re not fast food because we’re way better than fast food.” Right? Well, I got news for you, Wendy’s: you serve up the same crap you always have. It’s tasty, delicious crap, but it’s crap nonetheless. If I pull up to the drive-thru and order by number, will I get my food in less than five minutes at the second window? I will? That’s fast food.