There’s an old sorta funny story which you probably haven’t heard if you’re under 60 years old.

The butcher shop had a giant sign outside saying “Free chicken! Today only!”

The store was run by a mean, nasty, Dutch butcher. He had more hair on his shoulders than on his head. To make matters worse, he wore a sleeveless tee shirt to work everyday. The entire ploy behind the ‘giveaway’ was that when people walked in the door to pick up their “free chicken,” the mean butcher came out from behind the door and clocked them in the head with a baseball bat. Then laughed and laughed and laughed about it.

The moral of the story is that sometimes a deal is too good to be true and there might even be some sinister motive behind it.

My goodness, there are a lot of ‘free chickens’ out there today! And most of the time we get clocked in the head, or in the wallet, or in the heart, or our schedule gets clocked.

It happens everyday in all categories of business…..but guess what?

We still line up outside the butcher shop and wait to get in and pick up our ‘free chicken”.  Why do we also fall for these deals? They are everywhere. Insurance, banking, air travel, third party providers that make flight and room reservations, and they damn sure are giving away ‘free chickens’ in the mortgage business. They don’t call them “free chickens,” they call it “no closing costs.” Closing costs on a mortgage are things that HAVE to been completed in order to process and close the mortgage. Those include a title search, a title policy, attorney fees, appraisal of the property, credit scoring, and other fees that HAVE to be absorbed by the lender in order to close the loan.

Do you think they really give you those fees? Of course not. On loans with no out-of-pocket expense to the borrower those closing costs are loaded in the loan rate or some other feature of the loan. So people hear “no closing costs” and walk right into the butcher shop and get their head clocked.

It’s not just the mortgage industry (although having been in that industry I can tell you it might be the world capital of this nonsense) where this crap occurs. It’s all over the place. It never ceases to baffle me why companies think tricking people is the road to fattening the bank account. It might be for a little while but pretty soon that bank account is going to go on a fast. It cannot work over time.

I’m not in the meat business anymore. I went broke and maybe because I gave away too many chickens and now I’m in the customer service training business. My website is dedicated to providing you with the tools to run a successful business without giving away any chickens.

The chicken store is closed—-I promise.