For those of you without your McCalendars handy, we are in Week 3 of the 2008 McDonald’s Monopoly game. (If you don’t know what this is about, you can educate yourself on the topic on your own time using the greatest reference known to man, wikipedia.org, then come back here and read the rest.)

For many of us Die-Hard monopoly fans (I use the 1st person plural, here) this is an exciting annual event where a classic American board game involving fake money and dumb luck is paired with the international icon of American sloth and gluttony. And big macs.

The biggest difference in McOpoly this year (that’s mine, by the way, I just made it up but I am registering it as soon as I finish typing this) is that you can not only play it with the old-school paper tear-off “game pieces” tabby-things, you can also play online! Well, that and the grand prize is reduced from $5 million to a $1 million annuity paid out over 20 years, which, using the present value of an annuity formula:

We can determine to be, approximately, something much less than $1 million dollars. (Do your own math, I’m busy.)

All that being said, I am on my 24th consecutive day of eating only McDonald’s food -but not just any food- you see, they’ve tied the tear-off paper pieces ONLY to what he wants you to buy, Big Mac, Large Fries, Large Coke, that kind of stuff. “He” being the clown, of course.

At any rate, I did a little searching to see why I haven’t won yet, and I learned this bit of interesting knowledge: my odds of winning are actually “approximately 1 in 184,698,474,” To give that any sort of comparison, the oft-quoted odds of getting struck by lightning are 1 in 244,000. So, I am actually 75 and a half times MORE likely to get struck by lightning than to win the million dollar McOpoly® prize.

You see, the little paper bits are rigged. There’s nothing random about it. They’re all distributed “randomly” except for 1 piece of each set, the most famous being Boardwalk, of which there are 3. In the world. And don’t fool yourself by thinking, Well, I can still win the online prize. That’s rigged, too!

The same properties you can’t win in “Real Life,” namely the last property in each set listed alphabetically and Boardwalk, you can’t win online. The code you put in on each paper bit to roll the virtual dice determines where you can land. The Clown has successfully taken all of the fun out of the fake money and dumb luck game that so many Americans have cherished.

In summary, with the 2008 McOpoly® Game, the only Real Winners are the people that did not realize the Game was happening, Collected no game pieces, did not pass Go, and did not endure the ultimate price of contest entry- 1 month of eating reheated burgers and greasy fries.
–Shawn Butler

Oh, and the attribution for the awesome McSticker above is that superhero of the blogosphere, Steve Sneeds. The equally awesome McJoker image is from a post on HALOLZ.com.

A Little about Cost Markups: What do Balloons, Movie Theater Popcorn, Snow Cones and Starbucks Coffee have in common? They, along with Cotton Candy and Fountain Drinks are on the list of

But what is a “Markup?” and “What does this mean to us?” Markup, or Margin, is a marketing term for the price that a business puts on a product above what it costs to produce and deliver the good, usually determined as a percentage. In other words: the part that is straight profit.

Certainly there are more expensive items than coffee, cotton candy and popcorn –like porsches, condominiums and golf resorts– so what makes these items special? What kind of a markup would cause such a big deal?

How about this: No matter what a company sells, their price is a combination of two numbers: the cost of making and transporting the good they are selling (COGS) and the margin of profit (Markup).

COGS + Markup = Price

COGS is a set cost determined by the various expenses, fixed—such as overhead and insurance, and variable—such as raw materials and employee wages, that go into producing the product. Companies can do very little to affect this aspect of price, or at least that’s how I see it from the marketing side of the fence. The second part of price, however, the markup, can be shifted easily—this has no basis other than the price your customer is willing to bear.

For most consumer products, the average markup (“Retail”) is about 30%. For commodities –sugar, soap, pillowcases– markup is closer to 10%. But for “Premium” products –retail items aimed at the very rich, or the very demading (this is where we talked about Porsches, but also includes watches, Italian shoes, and vodka)– markups often approach 200% of Cost. And then “Ultra Premium” –products called by names like Mikimoto, Piaget, and Alfa Romeo– enjoy 400 and 500% markups. People gladly paying $750,000 for a car that costs around $20,000 to produce. For more on this, here is a great link.

But these don’t touch the 99.9% profit margins of the products mentioned above– the less than 1/50 of a cent that it costs to produce the .5 grams of a latex balloon that is filled with a burst of helium valued at 1/80 of a penny and sold for $3.00 at fairs and circuses across the US. This equates to a 1000% markup above COGS. Similar equations can be run for cotton candy, snow cones, your super-value bucket at the movie theater and your double iced caramel machiatto.

Imagine paying a 1000% markup on your car or your next burrito. That would be a $20,000,000 Altima or an $850 dollar Carne Asada bowl.

This Summer is the Summer of Threequels. This word may be made up but it is supposed to mean the 3rd movie in a trilogy, usually containing the number 3 in the title. For Whatever Reason, the Summer of 2007 will be full of the releases of really bad movie Threequels. Here is my list of movie Threequels released (or planned for release) this summer and the review (or expected review) of each:

List of Threequels in Summer ’07:
Pirates of the Caribbean 3 – Not quite as bad as 2, but nowhere near as good as 1.
Shrek 3 - Why are they still making these?
Spiderman 3 - Why so many villains? Why so many unresolved conflicts? Why so many flashbacks?
Rush Hour 3 - Wow. The world could have lived without this entire series.
Ocean’s 13 - Should be called “Ocean’s Eleven 2″ and we can all just pretend Ocean’s 12 never happened.
Bourne (#3) Ultimatum - Wow. I did not know people could be killed with produce.
& the 1 that doesn’t even know it’s a Threequel= Surf’s Up
or Animated Penguin Movie #3
Some Might Call it a Stretch, but I Label Surf’s Up as the 3rd in another Trilogy:
It’s the Threequel to The Year Shia LeBeouf Dispels his Disney Channel persona a la JT and Xtina by Being in Real Movies Series. In case you missed it, the first 2 installments to this Trilogy were Disturbia and Transformers. Even Steven has been busy in 2007.

Some movies are good enough that there needs to be a sequel. Some even deserve a whole series. But in most cases, it is pretty understood that movies should stop after 1. Here is my brief list of movies that should have stopped at 1 but did not:

Brief List of Movies with Really Bad Threequels:
Back to the Future 3
Batman (#3) Forever
Superman 3

(To Be Continued)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._box_office_bombs