Only every so often in a reporter’s career comes a story like the one on the run on free towels at Howsers.
I’m thinking of the story of the diapered duck that lived indoors with a local family. Or when Byron Rettinger strapped foam target animals to his lodge in Fort Seward, raising novel questions about zoning regulations. Or the advertised, romantic date that tent-dweller Nick Degtoff sought for his female pet cat so she could have kittens.
Such stories are gems. They write themselves and years later people still talk about them.
They’re one of the few reasons for staying at a job like reporting, where the hours are bad and you make enemies instead of money.
I knew I’d hooked such a story when I saw the sign up at Howsers bulletin board, explaining in so many words that hot consumer demand and lack of a redemption limit had bankrupted a store promotion that rewarded holiday shoppers with coupons for free towels. The store had given away $10,000 in free towels, and the filled-up coupon books were still coming in.
The story had everything: A statement on human nature (greed), a lesson about how good things can go awry (a promotion launched without a redemption limit), an absurdity (coveted towels), and a whodunit (speculation on who got all those towels).
When I read Howsers’ sign, I couldn’t stop laughing. It seemed to say so much about our town, where early birds bomb every garage sale and we can’t put a public trash can on Main Street without someone trying to save a few bucks by squeezing their household trash into it.
Then I became a bit depressed, thinking, “My God, people in this town could ruin anything. Can anything go right here?”
It’s easy to say the towel snafu was Howsers’ fault, and the contest should have limited a customer to a certain number of towels. But put yourself in Howsers’ place. Who would have expected so much interest in towels? How many towels do people need? I swear I’ve never bought a towel in my life. Towels just seem to come to a person. And they last forever. There was no apparent shortage when the promotion started.
I’m a regular Howsers shopper so I had bumped into a few of the towel collectors during the promotion. I phoned them for the newspaper story. They weren’t talking. I envisioned rooms of their houses stacked stacked to the ceilings with towels. Then I spoke to a woman who attended a Christmas party and received as a gift – a box of towels. Were people taking towels to send as gifts? But how would such a gift be received? What kind of present is a towel?
Then I resigned myself to thinking it was all about the lure of getting something for nothing. The prospect of that tickles a most sensitive spot in our monkey brains. We cannot resist free towels any more than we can resist bingo or another pull on a slot machine in Vegas. We’re wired for it.
But so many of us? And so many towels?
After weeks of tossing it around in my brain, I came to this conclusion: The towels are a parable not about greed, but about competitiveness. People in Haines like to win, more than anything else. In this case, we wanted to win the towels.
Maybe that’s why we fight so much over issues down at city hall. Not because we are so politically interested or engaged. Not because there’s nothing else to do here in winter. Not because our issues are so damned important.
But because we don’t like to lose. We like to come out on top. With all the towels.
Posted March 3, 2017