MEGA BUCKS & MEGA NUTS

Notes of Concern…
…Jack Blair

Mega Bucks and Mega Nuts
HAPPY NEW YEAR

Maybe it was because I had just returned from spending the Christmas holidays at Yosemite National Park, but the television “ad” really caught my attention. Throughout the next few days, it appeared again and again.

First you see a picture of a two-dollar bill, or facsimile thereof. You notice that it has a picture of one of our national parks. Then the voice tells you that you can have this collector’s item for a mere thirty dollars plus shipping and handling.

Who knew there were “collectors” of this sort of thing?

I am betting most of them live on the west coast!

With me so far?

You pay $30 and get $2 in return.

This limited edition is also colored. As I recall it is colored in yellow. And you can actually have it for $10 if you telephone your order soon enough.

The early bird still gets the worm (and how)!

With me?

You pay $10 plus shipping and handling and you get $2 in return.

But, since you are really a nice person, they will throw in another $2 bill if you act on the offer quickly enough.

Still with me?

You pay $10 plus unstated shipping and handling charges and you get $4 in return.

It takes the bright watchers and listeners only a short time before they realize the deal just went up 100% for them. They can grab two of these $2 bills instead of one if they smile and dial quickly.

Now it is obvious that there must be a large group of the easily fooled out there in TV land. Somebody recognized that printing up these flimsy pieces of paper, throwing in some yellow dye, and buying up the broadcast advertisement time, could yield a mighty handsome profit.

And, as an aside, they must have gotten a count of the gullible and addle brained in the United States before embarking on this scheme. In other words, they knew the market was out there.

Hey, if someone down in Connecticut (yes folks, not DC or NYC or “lalaLand”-not the U.S. Mint nor the Federal Reserve) can do this and make money, why not me? Those lower Fairfield county bumpkins have nothing on us real New Englanders when it comes to ingenuity.

So I am announcing that I am setting up shop right here in my town. I am going to beat these advertising geniuses at their own game.

I am going to get a local printer to run off a gazillion $4 bills. These will be colored in red, white and blue, not because they will be frameably beautiful but because I don’t want the U.S. Mint and the Feds knocking at my door and using words like “counterfeiter” and “criminal” and “hard time” any time soon.

In fact, I plan to use elementary school children to do the coloring. If the beautiful red, white and blue coloring doesn’t capture the investor, surely the child labor concept will.

My $4 bills will be available for the same price as those $2 babies. People seeing my ad will immediately recognize that my bargain is better than what they saw previously. Now they can get $8 for their investment of $10.

What a deal.

Who could refuse?

So I am planning on becoming the next instant billionaire. That Facebook founder guy better look behind because I will be coming up fast.

One problem I have yet to solve.

The ad I saw kept saying “shipping & handling” but never gave the cost of that. Realistically, two small rectangles of paper placed in an envelope with one stamp could surely only cost, say, in the neighborhood of $10.

Buyers have to understand that the shipping department does not require a lot of overhead but that “handling” part, now there you have a labor intensive effort.

So I will quietly collect $20 in real, spendable, U.S. currency (including shipping & handling) in return for my sending off the equivalent of $8 (two $4 bills) that will not be spendable, for a pure $20 profit, less labor, printing and paper costs.

I greet 2011 as the “Year of the Entrepreneurial Spirit”. This is the year I hit the jackpot. My mega millions await.

To keep the Feds happy and off my case I plan to share my client list with them. The Feds are very happy to occasionally get a count of the nut cases currently residing in the United States. It helps them arrange testing procedures to be used by Homeland Security at our airports, but that is another story.

There is only one possible way this plan could fail.

What if the kids cannot color within the lines!