10/15/09 Stockholm, Sweden – It’s just like the old “man walks into a bar” joke, but with a handcuffed ending and eerie parallels to the current economy…
Ohio woman Linda Brown walks into a Burlington Coat Factory.
She announces that she’s won the lottery. And that she’ll spot each shopper $500 toward their purchases today.
It works at first. Early shoppers are happy. One shopper even negotiates a $500 rent check instead of the shopping tab.
But, alas, the woman’s credit card quickly reaches its limit and is declined.
Turns out that she hasn’t hit the lottery at all. She’s created the money out of thin air… its only real in her own imagination.
The store tells the woman that they won’t accept her debt anymore.
She quietly slips out of the store.
Shoppers riot when they realize the woman’s disappeared and that they won’t be receiving all the free stuff they were promised.
So, we ask you dear reader: An isolated incident of a crazy woman off her meds? A disguised political figure doing her best to juice retail sales? A sign of things to come for the US?
We’ll leave this one up to you to decide.
Either way, it’s the oddest proof we’ve ever seen that there’s no free lunch, or coat for that matter. The full story on the woman offering to pay everyone’s tab is available from The Columbus Dispatch.
Rocky Vega
Rocky Vega is publisher of Agora Financial International, where he advances the growth of Agora Financial publishing enterprises outside of the US. Previously, he was publisher of The Daily Reckoning, and founding publisher of both UrbanTurf and RFID Update -- which he ran from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico -- as well as associate publisher of FierceFinance. Rocky has an honors MS from the Stockholm School of Economics and an honors BA from Harvard University, where he served on the board of directors for Let’s Go Publications, Harvard Student Agencies, and The Harvard Advocate.
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