Classification: Convenience
Here's a hypothetical situation: you are offered premium tickets to a major sporting event in your city if you are willing to also combine it with four pizza dinners–all for the price of $10. Seems like a deal too good to pass up, right? Well, using simplistic deductive skills and also reading the title to this entry, you already know part of this story, and indeed, all is not what it seems. Of course, this was not a hypothetical situation–I was a victim of this elaborate flimflam, and remain somewhat haunted by all that transpired to this very day. The pizzas were Tombstone frozen pizzas, and the tickets turned out to be for a Timberwolves-Pistons game in April 2013. The teams were playing out the final days of a dreary season with dreary players in a dreary arena among dreary fans. The pizzas, however, were not quite so good. And that night, I realized that frozen pizza and the Timberwolves were basically the same item: a product that meets enough basic, moral, and legal obligations to be a considered a marginal sub-brand that rides the coattails of something much greater than their own product.. How could I possibly come away from this implied contract disappointed with either the Tombstones or the Wolves? I was not coerced or intimidated into this; I acted on my own free will, and I chose poorly. As the executioner asks in the 90s TV commercial: "So what do you want on your Tombstone?" Pepperoni and cheese! (2 of 10 stars, Wolves win 107-101.)