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The other day I noticed that a coupon for free Reynolds Wrap posted a few years ago to My Receipts had inspired an outpouring of admiration from web site visitors who happened to find the page. I thought this was a little surprising, maybe even funny, but I made nothing substantive of it except to think wow, people sure do love Reynolds Wrap.
Now I am made aware of a darker side to this enthusiasm for Reynolds Wrap. It seems some nice folks arrive at that page and, lacking any context, they believe they are looking at an actual coupon for a free roll of Reynolds Wrap. They print the coupon and take it to their local Publix or Wal-Mart only to be declined, refused, humiliated, arrested, hand-cuffed and thrown into Guantánamo with other retail terrorists. The coupon is not valid and could not be construed as valid if printed from this site. I never scanned the back side of that coupon but I assume it is there that one would find a bar code or whatever it is that validated the piece of paper as a genuine manufacturors coupon. Without that unique information one might as well present a hand-written page saying “Free Reynolds Wrap.”
It is unfortunate that this is happening but I never intended for anyone who spotted that page to think they were looking at a valid coupon for a free roll of Reynolds Wrap. Unfortunately in this case, in the same ways that other knowledge gets warped in these search-throttled times, perfectly sane and sentient people believe whatever a search engine tells them in response to their carefully crafted search query. Some folks suggest the coupon is “FAKE” while others announce that attempting to use this coupon will get you in “BIG TROUBLE”, a warning I have a hard time believing.
I can’t lie, though. As uncomfortable as the encounters at these Publix and Wal-Mart cash registers might be I have to laugh at knowing that people are printing such utterly non-print-worthy pages from this web site and presenting them to cashiers around the country with the expectation of receiving free Reynolds Wrap. It reminds me a bit of the Pierre Salinger Syndrome, a softly-used term that refers to an incident in which the respected newsman found some bogus documents regarding the crash of TWA Flight 800. The documents were part of a garden-variety Internet hoax but Salinger believed them, waving his print-outs of the documents for all to see.
Few people refer specifically to the “Pierre Salinger Syndrome” any more. When reaching for a punch line to illustrate that reliable information is often hard to find on-line I think armchair pundits opt instead for the more general “I read it on the Internet so it must be true,” a bluntness which comprises the Pierre Salinger Syndrome and other examples of bad information looking good simply because a search engine makes it look that way.