As a child, I enjoyed running errands for my mother to fetch groceries and other items of daily use from a shop in our neighbourhood. Every time I made a purchase, the shopkeeper would reward me with a little bit of sugar candy or a piece of jaggery by way of bonus. The Punjabi word for it was choonga.With the changing times, however, the choonga custom went out of fashion. But I often ask myself, aren’t the present day sales promotion tactics — under which freebies are given with packs of tea, soap, toothpaste, shaving cream, jams, squashes, refined oils, et al — a liberalised version of the old choonga custom? The only difference is that while the choonga was meant strictly for juvenile customers, freebies are used to lure customers of all ages.The other day, at a departmental store, when I asked for a 500 gram pack of tea of a particular brand, the salesman replied, ‘‘It’s out of stock but we have others. Almost each one of them carries an attractive bonus offer.’’ He then drew my attention to a row of cute-looking plastic jars of tea and said, ‘‘If you buy this one, you get with it a tube of toothpaste. That one there carries with it a steel tumbler. The one that you see at the end of the shelf comes with a cut-glass bowl. Which one would you like to buy, Sir?’’For a while I toyed with the idea of buying all the packs and carting home a sackful of freebies. But the thought of foolishly overspending on tea and upsetting my household budget — apart from having to answer my wife’s possible teasing query if I was planning to open a shop of my own, stayed my hand. In the event, I settled for one pack that got me a tube of toothpaste.Shopping has become an interesting experience today. Almost every other thing displayed on a shopkeeper’s shelf has some freebie attached to it. The other day when I asked for a pack of gulab jamun mix at a shop, the shopkeeper asked his assistant to give me a ‘schemewala’ pack of gulab jamun mix. And, right enough, a pack of gulab jamun mix, along with a small pack of idli mix as a freebie, was handed over to me. When I asked the shopkeeper in a lighter vein what I would have got as a freebie if I had asked him for a pack of idli mix, his prompt reply was, ‘‘Why, of course a gift pack of gulab jamun mix!’’But not every freebie scheme proves a bonanza for the customer. Some time back, a readymade garments shop in our locality offered three shirts for the price of two. ‘Limited Stock’. Hurry’ said their highly persuasive ad in the local eveninger. I hastened to avail of this offer before their stock was depleted and have been regretting it ever since.The three shirts I brought home were not worth the price of even one. They lost their gloss and finish at the first wash. Today, I have to struggle to get into them. Which only goes to show that three for the price of two is not always a good bargain.
