There once was a company called Value America. (No, this isn't a limerick-- mainly because what rhymes with "America"?) During the original Dotcom boom, when people for some reason thought they could make money by selling everything below their own cost-- and making up for it in volume-- they had something called "ValueDollars", which was a type of credit applied when you bought things-- say, spend $100, get one ValueDollar. You could then apply earned ValueDollars towards up to 50 percent of the cost of a future purpose-- for example, you want something that costs $50, you have built up 25 ValueDollars, you could pay with 25 real dollars and 25 ValueDollars. Which in itself would not have been a big drain on the company-- but here is where they went wrong: they were giving out big promotional coupon codes. I'm talking about $20, $50, $100, I think some were for even more. And the codes were advertised in specific magazines or on specific web sites for exclusive promotions for that magazine/web site. Never, apparently, did it cross the minds of the marketing geniuses that someone could post on a message board that there was a coupon code called "cosmo50" (or something similar) and people could use it without actually seeing it in the magazine. And anybody with an account at ValueAmerica could use as many of the coupons as they could find-- there was no restriction to just one promo code. So people savvy to the situation ended up getting literally hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of free merchandise. (Some gamed the system by signing up multiple accounts in relative's names and taking the moron's money-- I was honest in that I only took the moron's money in my own name.) Amongst my booty was a $250 DVD player (the cheapest on the market at the time) for $125 and a $150 Diamond Rio PMP300 (first widely-produced MP3 player) for $75, plus a $50 mail-in rebate. It was a
lot of fun spending the money of all those venture capitalists before the dot.com bubble burst.
Anyway, my point before I went on that nostalgia trip was that at one point I ordered one of my
favorite pen (or maybe 2 or 3, I don't remember, but it doesn't make much difference) from them amongst a batch of DVDs and books and things-- and the pen (or pens) was drop-shipped separately from the other items. And that one loose pen (or two, or three) came shipped packed in popcorn and air bladders in a box big enough to ship a breadbox.