This was a first. It’s common practice whenever you walk past stores in say the mall to see vendors giving out free samples in hopes that people will enjoy it enough to become future customers. Essentially a more gorilla style marketing approach to introduce yourself to the world. But I recently heard a comment where a child was interested in trying a sample but the parents stopped him. The reasoning was they told him how if a company is giving away things for free there must be something wrong with it. For example, leftover food they couldn’t sell. That was kind of a shocking mindset I thought.
So many times we associate high priced items as being superior or great in quality compared to the cheap or free stuff. In reality, many times you are simply paying for the marketing and branding behind a product. Of course there are plenty of times products will have some kind of imperfection that results in it being heavily discounted or given away for free. But to teach people that free is automatically bad is a little silly.
As an example in terms of shopping, this essentially teaches a person to judge quality based on price tag comparisons rather than reading say the ingredients. Example, packages fruits that cost like five dollars doesn’t mean that fresh one for two dollars is worst. It can actually be better. Funny enough, if it was me I would probably encourage the child to try it for free and then look at the price of the item. That way they can start to appreciate the concept of value when it comes to money while appreciating the things you get for free.