A Package Deal

Our daughter's wedding was round the corner and my wife had been pestering me to make the arrangements. Lazy to the core, responsibilities, I had been avoiding this work on some pretest or the other. But when things reached a tipping point, I decided to take the bull by the horns and find a suitable tent-wala for the wedding.

My neighbors were kind enough to give me the address of a tent-wala whose services he had used for his daughter's wedding, with a word of caution. "You can't beat these guys as far as rates are concerned. But if you'll beat them in one thing, they will beat you in two," he warned. Nevertheless after a long discussion with the tent-wala, we arrived at a price for the shaming. "Are there any discounts"? I asked. "Sir, there are no discounts, but the price for you will be less if you take our package deal" came the cocky reply.

I'd heard about deals between Mittal and Arcelor, Sonia and Lalu and, more recently, Sonia and Mamatadi. But getting an offer from a tent-house salesman took me by surprise. The "package deal", it turned out, consisted of "all normal services plus furniture, decoration, mandap and food arrangements" I quipped: You are only a shamiana supplier, what do you know about furniture, decoration and food?" The salesman said: "We have a working relationship with other suppliers aimed t taking care of all our customers' need. Bring your cheque-book along and we'll take care for all your worries!

India's on the move, I told my wife when I got back home. Even tent-walas talk about working relationships, customer needs and what have you. "What's wrong with that? My wife asked. "If fast-food joints in cinema halls can offer deals, why can't poor tent-wala? This is what you call empowerment. Only, it wasn't just one tent-wala, there were four salesmen, each offering a deal different from the other. While one offered a free chair for every table, the other offered a free something else for every chair. I asked my wife: "If the number of guests we invite is fixed what we will do with extra tables and chairs? Besides, I hate this word deal. It makes me feel as if I am doing something's sinister, something under the table, like politicians. One more thing, the offers we get in cinema halls are not deals, they are combos"

"We never had these things in our times", said Arvin, a friend, who overheard our conversation. "All we had were Bata prices and off-season discounts. Marketing was largely transparent. Nobody hid anything from you. In fact there was nothing to hide. There were straightforward products with straightforward prices. You either took them or left them. These days they tell you only half the story, the other half is for you to guess. Or it's hidden behind asterisks saying conditions apply, in print you can hardly read.

I agreed. It was like incoming and outgoing call schemes or mobile companies. Only when you get the bill do you realize what you've gone and done. Two years since I took my connection, I am still to understand the business of incoming and outgoing calls. Arvin reminded me that they also wanted us to believe we can save more by spending more!

At this point, my wife interrupted: "Bata prices and discounts are passé. These are the days of happy hours, combos, grand slams, early bird discounts, and buy two-get one free, buy talc-get soap free and of course, package deals all aimed at making you buy what you don't really need. Go the mall I go to and you'll know what presentday marketing is all about." And that's how the tent-wala came to be absolved.