"Think about the value of freebies, it's definitely worth the effort. The best way is to be polite, and be yourself. It will happen. I've done this many times. Get into splits group and host a large Malle, buy it from Barney's in LV and make an acquaintance/friend. You'll reap the rewards for your time."
He's referring to perfume samples as "freebies," and clearly suggesting that attaining them requires at least one expensive perfume investment, followed by extensive networking. Perfectly reasonable, if one desires "free" perfume samples, right?
Wrong! Fuck no. I shook my head in disgust when I read that. That mentality is the reason I can no longer get a free sample of a $300 perfume, something I used to be able to do with ease between 2009 and 2013. Going back to the nineties and 2000s, if you wanted to sample something, you could go to a Macy's or Bloomingdale's or Neiman Marcus, walk up to a counter, and they'd shower you with freebies, all in the hopes that you would then buy something. That doesn't happen anymore.
Nowadays, if you want to know what something smells like before you spend $300 on it, you have to pay $10 for a 2 ml sample. Often you have to shake the sample out of the sales clerk like you're mugging her at gunpoint in a dark alley. Even when you show people money, it's an exhausting effort for them to "find" what you're asking for in sample form, and it inevitably leads to them rummaging around, as if the very notion of a customer trying before buying is unheard of. Sometimes they'll break out a tester bottle, which is no bad thing, but often they don't have one available. What was once an accommodating industry of friendly people looking to develop a positive relationship with customers, is now a snooty profit-seeking hole of arrogant sales clerks and put-up-or-shut-up greed.
The guy commenting in the thread has accepted this as if it's totally normal, and devised a way to go about attaining samples: Put in extra effort. Sounds okay at first, but context kills his logic. I shouldn't have to put in effort. I shouldn't have to be polite. "Be yourself" shouldn't cross my mind when I approach a brand for samples. I shouldn't have to win brands over and tempt them into offering me something. They should be offering it to me to begin with. I'm a potential customer. How am I supposed to buy a pricey ($100+) fragrance in 2024 unless I know what it smells like first?
Companies won't give me anything today. I can write to Roja Dove, or Malle, or Chanel, and ask with all the sugar in the world, and the response will be that I can have as many samples as I want, and here's the price (direct link to the "coffret" of vials, for the price of a full 30 oz bottle). This all started in 2013, and became the industry standard by 2016. Since then, if I want samples, I have to pay for them. The easiest thing to do is go to Lucky Scent and just order what I want. They claim to sell .7 ml samples for most of what they offer, and it seemed like they upped the amount after I'd made some purchases, but I'm not sure of that. It's all fine and well, but I shouldn't have to do it in the first place. I should be able to get free samples from Lucky Scent. I'm a Lucky Scent customer. I want to buy a product from them. If I have to buy the sample too, then maybe it's a waste of money for me. I have to absorb the risk that Lucky Scent won't sell a fragrance to me, instead of Lucky Scent absorbing that little risk in the name of selling me the product in the end. Might be fair, business is business, but I saw how it worked before the risk-aversion set in, and I'm not convinced this is the way to go.
To me, the strangest aspect of all of this is the way in which people act like it was never a thing. When another member mentions that he still wants freebies, Hednic, once a "Basenotes Institution" (now weirdly re-named a "Well-Known Member," which I have thoughts on), shrugs and says, "Would be nice, but wishful thinking I'm afraid," as if free perfume samples is pure fantasy. People are acting like free samples isn't how the world works. Except it was how the world used to work, right up until ten years ago.
I don't want to imply that free samples are never, ever given. You go to Macy's and get into a conversation with an SA, someone under the distinct impression that you're going to purchase, or knows that you are purchasing, and there's a solid chance that if you ask for a sample, he or she will toss a couple in the bag free of charge. But that's a departure from how it used to be. I'm dating myself, but when I bought my first bottle of Allure Homme back in 2000, the SA was plying me with samples of every other designer thing that I wasn't buying that day. Naturally, I found it annoying. I was spoiled. I was living in a world where I didn't want a ton of samples, because I was given samples every time I stopped at a counter. I had accumulated a dozen samples of things I would never buy. And to a degree, my feelings were justified, as I could easily sample these designer frags for myself on my own time at any number of stores. I didn't need carded samples of them.
Thus, my position on samples for designer fragrances is slightly more amenable to how it's done these days. My ire is directed more at niche. The current niche culture expects customers to "work" for the privilege of wearing perfumes. Those who don't work must pay. It's unacceptable. It's akin to a car dealer expecting customers to buy without test-driving. Or a big-box electronics store expecting customers to buy a boxed unit without having one set up in the store for them to go hands-on with. The likelihood of a purchase is relegated to nonexistent, or "blind" status. And I'm sorry, but I'm not blind-buying anything over $100. Once you step past the designer line with prices, I expect to know exactly what I'm getting, and frankly I'm not really comfortable with buying anything over $50 blind, so this all goes without saying. The phrase "buyer beware" applies.
As for the industry, and whatever use samples offered it, I would hazard to guess that they were a risk, but a net positive in the long run. The problem today is that businesses no longer take risks. Look at Hollywood; everything released in the last eight years is a sucky remake. They're all sloppy retreads that nobody asked for, yet because their IPs were once profitable, studios are willing to throw money away, even if the finished products bomb. Taking chances on new, minimally-tested ideas was once the norm in Hollywood, which is how all the great films of the eighties and nineties were made. Now we get crappy, chintzy, and sometimes even deadly Netflix/streaming stuff made on sub-$10 million budgets (Alec Baldwin, eat your heart out), and don't even see the receipts when they bomb.
Spending an aggregate amount of money on printing the cards and bottling the samples was once a risk taken by the fragrance industry, taken because a customer's ability to sample the wares had always translated to long-term sales. Sure, the likelihood that someone who had just smelled a new sample would then immediately say "I'll take it" was extremely slim, but consider the legion who went home with a sample, experienced it at their leisure, and decided a few months later that they wanted a bottle! This worked. But it was a risk; there were plenty of fragrances that weren't bought, and samples that went by the wayside. That's how the world works. You take risks in business, and the bigger the risk, the bigger the potential payoff. What fails ends up going into the discard bin, and shapes the evolution of bigger and better things (link).