I’ve written before about my weekend morning ritual of checking the email (mostly junk) and light doom scrolling (completely junk) while I drink my coffee.  Today I was confronted by an email which by its existence proves a point I have also made before—we need to focus on improving education in this country with even more energy, even more fervor than was used to destroy it.

The email was an ad from a company I actually buy from regularly.  I didn’t ask for the email which makes it unwanted, but it is from a company I patronize so it was spam but maybe better prepared spam.  In the early days of the internet there was a name for this that was not spam but I no longer recall what it is.  

The ad was a celebration of having achieved some sales milestone and out of the goodness and generosity in their hearts they have decided to give us customers a gift in the form of a discount, if we purchase before a specific date of course.

This is where education comes in and it comes in two main areas: Logic and basic math (which used to be called arithmetic).

The logic part.  I am being offered a gift of the ability to purchase more and at a time when I was not in the market for their product, and that is so that I can participate in their celebration???

I’m happy the company is doing well and I’m not surprised that it is.  They make a quality product and even after they recently raised the price it is still well worth the expense.  However, me buying more of their product than I need, at a time when I do not actually need to buy it, benefits them and not me.  For them to present this truth in any other way is a fallacy of logic.  Put another way it is an error in their thinking which I saw through rather quickly because I have studied philosophy, specifically logic.  

I highly recommend you do the same.  Take a bunch of philosophy courses.  Logic, rhetoric, ethics, epistemology, and most important fallacy or fallacy of thought as it is sometimes referred to as.  These courses teach the art of thinking and what actually makes up knowledge versus fluff, a skill our modern world is in desperate need of.  

This type of education if utilized in your life will make it very difficult for someone else to fool you or convince you something is truth when it is only a not even artfully hidden opinion.

Maybe that is too much to ask.  It could take a very long time to add such course material to a public education system.  Even in college these classes can be rare, depending on the school one attends.  My Logic course had seven people in it as I recall but was one of my all-time favorite learning experiences.

Arithmetic on the other had is already being taught in public schools from early elementary years through high school, but I don’t think it is being taught very well.  2+2 = 4 is only part of the reason learning mathematics is important.  The other part really is the important part and unfortunately the part everyone (at least in my experience) complained about learning the most—the dreaded word problem, which by the way, teaches the philosophy of mathematics or at least is supposed to.

Here’s what I saw in that email which lead me to ignore my coffee cup and pull out my laptop.  The generous gift being offered was a discount, the more you buy the more you save, cried the ad but really the opposite was true. 

Here is what the offer was:

Buy one, get one half off.

Buy two, get one free!

Buy three, get two free!

Different discount codes were listed each of the three levels.  This is actually a marketing research technique but I digress.

It would seem the best of the best deals would be to buy three and get two free, wouldn’t it?  at least that is what the company making the offer wants you to think but remember this company makes its money from selling their product so buy more helps them and not you.

Buying three products and getting two free results in you having five but only paying for three or 3/5 cost factor or a 2/5 discount or 40%.  That sounds pretty good, but is it really the best?

Buying two and getting one free is a discount of 1/3 or 33.3%…well that isn’t nearly as good is it?

However buying one and getting one half price is a 50% discount and also will result in my only having to figure out where to put two of their products.  With this option you actually save the most in terms of cost of product.  If you assume a price of $10 each that means you spend $15 and get two where as with the one they are trying to get you to fall for you spend $30 (twice as much) and get only 2 in exchange.  Yes the third option will get you $20 worth of product for free, instead of $5, but they have also gotten you to spend three times as much of your money in the process and as a bonus you feel good about the transaction.

They might even have made a person choosing the 5 for 3 deal feel sufficiently good to overlook the fact that with the increased numbers of their products not quite reaching the free shipping level, they will more than make up for their $20 in lost revenue.

I suppose I could have titled this article Sales 101 or Marketing to Mental Midgets…

Anyway take some math and philosophy classes or read some books and then think about voting to improve our educational system in this country so maybe we won’t fall for some political charlatan again.

ChatGPT created art and for the record the prompt which generated the picture above was to create an image of a young woman armed with knowledge of mathematics and philosophy not being fooled by some orange faced loser who wants to be president. any resemblance to actual people is unintentional and hilarious…..

Did you spot my mathematical error?