Too Poor To Win?

Did you know that it's possible to be too poor to win prizes?  Everyone knows that this is 100% true in the USA, where you are responsible for paying taxes on the value of any prize won. Often, this can be more than the prize winner can afford.  If they are lucky, they can sell or trade the prize for cash which will allow them to pay the taxes and hopefully have something left over.  But did you know that you can be too poor to win in Canada?

Here are some recent examples from Sportsnet Radio the FAN590, an all-sports radio station in Toronto, Ontario.

1. Last month they had an awesome contest, the Man Cave Contest, where you could win a big screen TV, media centre and some sports memorabilia to decorate your 'man cave'.  All you had to do to qualify was submit a photo of your man cave as of right now.  Presumably, the owner of the most pathetic (or at least interesting) man cave would be declared the winner.
   
   Last I checked, poor people don't have digital cameras, nor do they have cell phones which conveniently do double duty as digital cameras.  Further, poor people tend to have lots of poor friends and not many, if any, affluent friends, so borrowing a camera is most likely out of the question.  So by insisting on this 'simple' condition of entry poor people are excluded from the contest.
   
2. The FAN590 just concluded a contest for tickets and travel arrangements to see a World Series game.  This wasn't a problem until last year when passports became mandatory for all forms of travel into the United States.  To obtain a minimal passport one has to shell out at least $87 and wait.  And wait.  And wait.  Expediting the process costs extra.  $87 may not sound like much...unless you're poor in which case it is likely prohibitive.  Once again this contest is of no use to the poor.
   
3. The FAN590 is currently running a contest called The Bucket List.  Listeners are supposed to contact the station and arrange an on air interview with one of 30 famous personalities that show hosts Greg Brady and Jim Lang have on their 'bucket list' of celebrity interviews.  Listeners may also arrange for interviews with other celebrities that are not on the bucket list, but this is solely at the discretion of the station.  In other words, they may accept your unlisted celebrity if the celebrity is sufficiently famous or interesting...at their discretion.
   
   Last I checked, celebrities and poor people almost never interact, and their relationships are even less likely to be close enough to be able to negotiate an on air interview.  This is a contest for the well-to-do.  The prize is a vacation to Honduras so the passport issue comes up again.  This one is a double exclusion for the poor.

Is this surprising?

Not really.

Organizations that run contests are doing so to boost (or at least maintain) market share.  High ratings help secure more and better sponsors for more lucrative contracts.  If your demographic skews rich, advertisers are even more rabid to buy ad time/space as you are reaching people with disposable income that are more likely to buy their product, whatever it is.  That's called reaching your target market.  On the other hand, if your demographic skews poor, advertisers will almost always bypass you entirely.  In other words, the poor have no value to for-profit organizations, and that should come as no surprise.  When they engage in charitable causes, it tends to be a business decision rather than a true act of charity.  Stated another way, that means that for them charity is more about tax deductions and good publicity, not some magnanimous attitude towards the poor, needy or disadvantaged.  If it was the latter, people and corporations would donate well beyond the tax credit limit for their income and by a wide margin most don't.

For me the real killer in these examples is the first one.  There was no poverty-based barrier inherent in the prize (short of homelessness, in which case you have bigger problems than winning TVs) -- everyone can use a (better) TV.  Instead, the station invented an unnecessary barrier that excluded the poor.

I for one, have one TV, but it is about 45 years old and has a broken 8-inch B&W picture tube which is probably impossible to fix or replace in the 21st century.  So, basically I don't have a TV.  My radio broke last week when it fell from a height (I have rambunctious cats), so I really don't have a man cave at all.  My submission would have been of the empty space where my man cave would be if I had a man cave.   I really wanted to win this prize since it was the only way I was going to get a TV with a digital tuner at any point in the foreseeable future.  (With all broadcasters having switched to digital signals, older TVs with analog tuners require the purchase or rental of additional hardware to receive any kind of coherent signal.)  I eventually did scrape together the money for a very cheap camera, but by then the contest had closed.  It took me more time to amass $40 than it took to run the contest.  I'll be ready next time, unless they find a new way to exclude me.  For what it's worth, I'm paying for the splurge as I am currently in a major cash flow dilemma.

If I am disappointed or upset, I have no one to blame but myself.  No one ever said that life was fair, and it isn't, yet somehow, I keep expecting it to be -- entirely my fault.