Free Food

A curious sight outside Tribune Tower: A line of office workers and tourists stretched from Pioneer Court to Illinois Street -- a football field in length. The reason? A pizza company was launching a new line of pies and offering free slices to passersby.

It's a physiological function of humans: When food is free, logic is discarded like a Vienna sausageless toothpick.

Consider the economics. A slice of pizza costs the consumer roughly $3. Those in line last week waited 30 minutes or longer. So if you make more than $6 an hour (and if you work near Michigan Avenue, you likely do), it's cost-prohibitive to stand in line for a free piece of pizza -- even a new DiGiorno Flatbread Melt.

And yet, people did it anyway. Once the word "free" is attached to "food," we apply a separate set of standards. Synapses connect to some pleasure center in the brain as if we're hard-wired to travel many miles and wait many minutes for something that actually costs very little.
...
...
New York Magazine compiled a list of sob stories of those trying to access the free-chicken voucher at Oprah.com. One woman said it took her more than three hours to print the coupon.

But getting the coupons was the easy part. Many would-be diners found that KFC had ended its free chicken promotion early when demand outstripped supply. Hell hath no fury like a chickenless customer scorned. At a KFC in Manhattan, there were reports of patrons staging a sit-in at the restaurant.
...
(more...)