Free To Be Ignored

In the late 1960s, two separate groups—the Diggers in San Francisco and the Yippies in New York—began operating "free stores." These were places where people could come to get things they needed—food, medicine, clothes, and, in some cases, cash—for free. These were designed simultaneously as parodies of, and alternatives to, the usual American consumer materialism. The stores were not around for very long because (at least in New York) people would come in and simply take everything they could put their hands on. Such predictable incursions were contrary to the spirit of the enterprise, but people who set themselves against market principles are ill-positioned to enforce "limit one per customer." Now, four decades later, comes Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail , whose new book proclaims that giving things away for free is the "radical" new business model of the future. According to Anderson, there are a variety of ways businesses can and should do this, and once ... (link)