I’ve been thinking over this of late and quite frankly, I think it would have to come down to your own personal understanding and your own personal feelings on what is free. In the end, no business or company anything for free. It’s bad for business and a very poor business model. People don’t get into business to give away stuff. They are there to make cash and copious amounts of it, whether honestly or through deception.

When companies give away samples of their products at shopping malls, whilst it is “free”, they are basically enticing you to try their service in the hope you will find it superior to their competitors or to introduce their service to the market and believe me, they have already factored this into their advertising budget. Therefore the buyer who purchases this product is paying more for the service than they should. Hence really the samples given out aren’t in fact free.

And when it comes to the Net, the lines blur just that little bit further. To get free stuff, at the very least you need to pass over your name and postal address to have the product mailed to you. Therefore if that company wants to send out newsletters and other promotional material, they have your name and address. Your details can also be onsold to other marketing companies for them to send you unsolicited mail. So long as you’re happy with that, then sure it’s still free.

However on a more involved level you may be asked to fill in a questionnaire that may take up quite a bit of your valuable time. From here, the company not only has your private details but can gauge a much better understanding of your buyer behaviour to tweak their advertising towards marketing suitably for you to make a purchase. They can drill down on statistics and know your age range, your opinion on certain packaging, what makes you tick, what you would lean towards etc. You might get your free item, but at what cost? In the end you may end up spending $100 on products that you otherwise might not have if you didn’t fill out the questionnaire.

So in conclusion my personal answer to this question is no. The time it takes to fill our registration forms and surveys to participate to get these free samples, is not worth my time. I could spend an hour a day filling out forms to get a couple of freebies, but if I actually worked that hour, I could have purchased all the free stuff anyway. So the question is, how much is your time worth?

However these are just personal ramblings of a raving lunatic and should no way discourage you should you enjoy getting free samples!

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