Bellevue Toyota-Scion "winner" key mailer

TLDR: If you get something like this in the mail, don't waste your time. Throw the key away and recycle the rest.

The other day we got this flier in the mail from the Bellevue Toyota-Scion car dealership with a cheap car key attention-getter stuck to it which said it had two codes on it and if they matched, we were guaranteed to win one of four prizes: A new SUV-looking vehicle, an iPad 2, a $300 gift card to wal-mart, or $250 in cash. I googled this and found nothing, which is either because no one took the trouble to do what I'm doing now or the dealership uses copyright takedown notices for PR purposes like everyone else.

Anyways, we read the fine print and decided we may as well go and see what would come of it. My roommates were hopeful, and I was mostly concerned about accidentally getting wallet-raped. We got to Bellevue and this salesman guy started asking us questions about our driving situation and whether we wanted a new car and so forth. He brought us into the building, sat us down at some tables in a showroom, and pulled out this sheet of paper onto which he started writing various information he was asking of my roommate. My roommate expressed that he was really only interested in what we won. The guy said he understood that and kept asking questions like where he worked, what kind of payments he could afford to make, etc. When asked for a phone number, I gave them mine. I regret this now; they haven't called or texted or anything, but it would have been far preferable to recite the number for the rejection hotline-- unfortunately, I didn't have it memorized. He then pointed over to this board on a table at the side of the room with several winning codes on it; ours was at the bottom: $5 wal-mart gift card.

I excused myself to get a drink from the water fountain and when I came back, the salesman had gone off to the corner of the room, like they do, to talk with the other employees about the sales situation and whatnot. I told my roommate that they were probably gauging how long we were willing to wait there to see how much control they had over us emotionally and whatnot and began to run some numbers by him. If our time was worth $5 an hour post-tax and there were two us waiting, it was only worth it if we only spent a half hour on the whole thing. The guy came back, gave us the card and called us "friends" at which point we got the hell out. My roommate was mad that they were tricky and expressed that he thought their general scheming behavior was more typical of a third world nation than these united states, and I was happy that we got out financially unharmed.

I'm glad I went, because taking that card cost them $5. I wish to make it illegal to send me mail like that, because I consider it a waste of my time and emotional energy, and bad for the environment. Remember kids, new cars just aren't worth it. Having a used car fixed up might cost $1000. A new car loses that much value the moment you drive it off the lot.