Wednesday, March 19, 2008

People REALLY Win With The Popcorn Trick!


Facts about items given away by certain podcasts:
  1. Shirts can't be used to make gooey melted sandwiches.
  2. Shirts can't provide cool dessert feelings.
  3. Shirts can't give you something blue & cylindrical to suck on.
Shirts can't do any of those things, but the prizes we give away CAN!

During the recording of our Podcast Episode 4.0, I decided (on the fly) to reward our listeners. Specifically, all of our listeners who were willing to both listen to our podcast almost to the end AND figure out how to send us an email.

I would reward them with items selected randomly from Wawa. The one-stop shop for almost anything you'd need.

How to randomly select those items? That's where my good friend Excel stepped up.

First I broke down the entire contents of a Wawa into 9 major categories:
  1. Drinks
  2. Sandwich/Sides
  3. Chips
  4. Baked Goods (including Tastykakes)
  5. Candy
  6. Fresh Food (fruit, vegetables)
  7. Frozen/Dairy
  8. Newspaper/Magazine/Tobacco
  9. Desperation Aisle ("regular" groceries you only buy from Wawa if you're in a rush)
Each of the winners were randomly assigned one of these categories using Excel's RAND() function.

Before going to Wawa, I filled out an entire spreadsheet of random numbers generated by Excel. One column had a list of #s randomly selected between 1 and 10. The next column between 1 and 9. And so on.



The plan was to use these numbers within each category to choose any of a number of sub-categories. Whether it was the # of shelves in the candy aisle, the # of options in the sandwich touch screen, or the # of dairy cases, I left it up to whatever gods the creater of the RAND() function worshiped.

And it came out quite well. I was hoping that the sandwich touch screen would yield some horrible concoction, but instead it resulted in a 1/2 lb. of Cooper Sharp cheese, sliced thick. Other lucky winners got some ice cream inspired by the Democratic primaries and a candy push pop.

Congratulations, you lucky bastards!



Apropos of nothing, here are some weird links I found when searching for a Wawa graphic:

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