False Advertising for Dummies 2

I saw this sign yesterday:

It is advertising that you can Lose 20 pounds for 7 dollars.

That sounded like a great deal!

So I called the number and to my surprise, the brilliant ad-man who answered the phone was blatantly lying about the intentions of the sign!

I must admit that I was a bit suspicious when I called.

If the business model did indeed allow people to pay a flat fee in the promise of losing a set amount of weight, this posed a few problems:

I mean, was this a personal training type of thing? Did they just put you in a dungeon until you withered twenty of your pounds away? Did they extract body parts? At roughly 3 pounds of weight per dollar, a million different scenarios ran through my head.

The most likely is that this is some sort of exercise program.

So, let’s say you ran a program for fat people to work out, and you had this one fat person who couldn’t lose weight and they just kept coming back for twenty years until their heart gave out? Wouldn’t you have to kill them at some point? Especially since people gain a pound per year, on average, so even if someone did your exercise program for twenty years and maintained a normal weight trajectory, they’d be right back where they started after the first twenty.

What if someone was just real lonely and showed up to work out, but with very low intensity?

I’ve seen a lot of ridiculous things regarding false advertising in my day – for example, why do all McDonald’s ads almost exclusively strive to appeal to African Americans? What are they trying to say? But this particular ad really takes the cake.

Shame on you, guy at (818) 533 8694 for trying to take advantage of people who are twenty or more pounds overweight. And shame on you for participating in the false advertising epidemic.

I invite you all to call him and ask him some additional information about the 20 for 7 program.