I was passed this news about a motor company in the US called Max Motors who offers what’s got to be one of the most eyebrow raising business strategies I have seen. Essentially, by purchasing a car through them you have an option of receiving either a $250 gas card or a gun.

The company is promoting this fairly heavily too as when I visited the site the message was pretty loud and clear about the gun offer as you can see here:

It’s kind of mind boggling in some ways to read a quote saying “We are aware of the gasoline and crime problem in America. Max Motors, the Country Dealer wants to be part of the solution and not part of the problem”.

The firearm laws must be lot more lenient down there compared to here. From a business perspective, this will probably generate a lot of buzz and sales for them as it does almost everything such as the business doing something unique and it gets people to talk about them. It seems so wrong though from a morality point of view.

I’m actually interested in seeing how that business does afterwards as while I’m sure there will be a lot of protest, this could be those cases where for some businesses any publicity is good publicity.

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For those who live here in BC, you may be aware that back in February a government legislation was passed where BC residents will receive $100 as part of the climate action dividend. Essentially, the intent of this money is that we put it towards buying things that cost a little more which would help the environment to raise awareness about climate change. You can read more about it at the small business and revenue site.

Now for most people you won’t have to do anything more as you should have already filed your tax returns by now. Based on what I read, people can start to expect to receive their $100 starting at about mid June of this year. What was interesting that I read though was that even children qualified for this payment.

Essentially, if you have say two kids then you can apply for another $100 for each child. However, the child must be registered with the Canada child tax benefit. So if you haven’t already and need to, contact the Canada Revenue Agency and apply for it. You can find more information about it at the site above.

Update
Cheque I received here.

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I was reading and browsing through Microsoft’s “Live” search which of course is in competition with companies such as Google. It seems that they are trying out a new program called Cashback at http://search.live.com/cashback/ where people can search for thousands of products from various merchants. Once the user makes a qualifying purchase, they will receive some form of credit.

I suppose the hope with that incentive is that people like us will start flocking over and use Live as our preferred search engine. Unfortunately, I was unable to test it out as it seems to be restricted to US residence only at this time. While I suppose it is a great way to save money, I don’t know if that will necessarily persuade people from switching over.

I still use Google most of the time personally as the search results just seem to be better. Another way to save and make some money I suppose though.

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A topic came up today which is one that I have heard many times with the answers usually being the same when it comes to various sides of the debate. In general, most people agree that having things like a car is one of the worst money drainers if you are on a tight budget. At the same time, many people say they don’t have a choice for things such as getting to work.

When I think about it, not having a vehicle dependent mindset was one way that I was able to save more money for other things. I guess I can even use a teenage job as an example where when I was looking for work I made sure that I didn’t have to necessarily rely on public transportation or a car to get there (That meant a lot of walking). Even nowadays if there is say some kind of snowstorm I can do a lot of the work remotely. Unless the power gets knocked off in the whole area that is…….

I’m personally more inclined to believe that vehicles aren’t an absolute necessity per say and so I would treat buying one almost the same as having say your own airplane. While I’m sure it can make things more convenient, if it really hurts you financially then maybe it can be good to reconsider your current lifestyle settings.

With a similar train of thought, if you revolved your life around needing a private jet of some sort when you don’t necessarily have say billions of disposable income it is almost the same thing as trying to maintain a lifestyle with a car if you are just barely making it.

I’ve seen many people literally get say new jobs in the same field for less pay that was a lot closer to home. However, in the end they actually made more money as they didn’t have to worry about things such as gas and insurance rates. Something to think about though as everyone obviously has different circumstances.

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Recently I was reading about a business strategy for a seminar where they tried to sort out the serious minded people from those who didn’t really care when it came to attending. What they did was that they mentioned the event had a registration fee of about $20.

In actuality, the event was free upon arrival. The end result was that most of the attendees were people who were serious when it came to learning at the event and was the ideal type of people they were looking for. So while they didn’t get as big of a response, they definitely got a lot of “qualified traffic”.

I learned that technique before and it is definitely true in many cases where if something is free people don’t tend to take it very seriously. Just like joining say some kind of web publishing network, since most of them are free people tend to just sign up and do nothing with it as there is no immediate fear of loss. Just by putting a price tag on it, many times it will make people want to take action immediately and to really be serious about it.

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