Kids love when you offer them things through magazines. It doesn’t matter how bad the deal is or how big of a scam it is. Young people, with their sweet dispositions and laughable naivety, will go all-in with literally any attempt at selling them something.

This was a lot more prevalent in the 50s, with grand offerings of decoder rings, x-ray glasses and sea monkeys. Each of them was a bigger pile of trash than the one before it, but kids wanted to believe, so they did.

When I was growing up, the offers had changed but their power was just as great. If you flipped through any magazine published in the 80s, it was impossible to get through it without landing on a full page ad that took advantage of our MTV obsession by promoting what could only be described as the deal of the century. A dozen cassettes (and later on, CDs) for just…one…penny.

Who could resist? We didn’t bother to check the logic behind it. Forget “if it’s too good to be true…” We dove right in. And when the CDs came in the mail, it was proof that God did exist, and that he loved us, and that he knew we needed a ridiculous deal on music.

Almost everyone I knew had a BMG account. They also had the letter to collections that went with it.

That’s right, although it was utterly inconceivable to us at the time, there was a catch. By accepting the offer of twelve CDs for one cent, you were automatically enrolling in their club. And the club had two ways they could get you.

The first way was sneaky. Every month, unless you opted out (and no one ever did, because no one realized there was anything to opt out of in the first place) BMG would send you their “Album of the Month”. Once you received it, you had something like ten days to return it if you didn’t want it, or you’d be charged the full price of the CD.

Brain surgeons that we were, we never actually read what was being sent to us. We just assumed that BMG was sending us more free stuff out of the goodness of their heart. So when “Cracked Rear View” by Hootie and the Blowfish arrived in the mail, we just threw it away and went on with our lives. Do that once a month for an entire year, and you’ve got quite the debt on your hands.

Even if you were smart enough to send the CD back, and to then try and cancel your membership before any more garbage was automatically sent to you, they had another stipulation. You couldn’t cancel your membership until you bought five CDs at the “regular price”. And to them, regular was somewhere in the vicinity of $20-$25 per album. Craziness.

And through all that, we never gave up. When we were in high school, we were much more aware of the tricks BMG played on us, but we were still determined to somehow beat the system. Long story short, we found codes for even more cheap CDs on top of the 12 they initially gave you, so that even with the five you had to purchase, it worked out to about $5 a CD. Certainly not a penny, but not a bad deal considering an album was still $10-$15 in the store.

Then it got worse. We figured if we bought the CDs at like four or five dollars, we could sell them back at Coconuts or a store like that for six dollars and make a couple of bucks. Yes, it’s a giant waste of time to only profit like ten dollars, but that was about a tank of gas back then, and who would say no to a tank of gas? Not me, that’s who.

What we soon learned though was that the CDs BMG sold to you weren’t like normal CDs. They actually had different bar codes so that you couldn’t sell them back to any major chains. The sons-of-a-gun had thought of everything.

BMG is long gone, as far as I can tell. Believe it or not, Columbia House is still around, though instead of 12 CDs for one cent, they’re offering three DVDs for a dollar each. Definitely not the deal of the past, but I might sign up for old time’s sake.

If that doesn’t scratch the itch, I’ll give you my address. I’ll mail you a penny and you can mail me whatever CDs you don’t want any more. Sounds like a plan to me.

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