The Inertia Business Model

This can will feature again, later in the story, I promise

Like any physical object moving through space, I am a sucker for inertia. Every day, I basically stagger through several hours of work, stagger through several hours of life, and then stagger into bed. The next morning I get up and repeat the process. Changes frequently happen to me; it’s much rarer that I initiate them.

The genesis of this thought is that I’ve just received my monthly subscription package from a company called Beer52. It is a box that’s delivered (almost always when I’m out) filled with craft beers from around the world. It’s £27 a month for 8 beers (and a few bar snacks) which works out, according to the calculator on my phone, at about £3.40 per beer (the beers are of quite varying sizes, but most are 440ml: the same as a can of Coke here in the UK). This is, by all accounts, not amazing value for beer — especially as every other beer is something that I really don’t want to drink. Oatmeal stouts, coffee porters, raspberry APAs: the number of delicious, normal beers is outweighed by the number of weird, novelty drinks.

So why, you might ask, am I a subscriber to this service? Firstly, they are a major advertiser on podcasts, at least here in the UK. And there are only so many times that I can hear about a product before attritional marketing does its business and I succumb to the purchase. So that’s how I began the subscription, with a free month trial…