Columbia House Achievement

This article contains unmarked spoilers for Book 6.

System Message. Posting Book 8 spoilers will result in "acceleration" per our rules.

The Columbia House Achievement is an achievement awarded to Carl when he takes out a loan to pay for the ring upgrade in Club Vanquisher.

AI Description

New Achievement! Columbia House!

There was a time when you could get twelve albums for a penny. That’s right. A goddamned penny. It was great! The ads were everywhere. Each colorful, full-or-double-page ad appeared in just about every publication in North America from the 1970s until the 2000s. And let’s not forget the catalogs they mailed directly to your home! Each ad or catalog featured stacks and stacks of today’s hottest music, from Hall and Oates to ABBA to my personal favorite, Gloria Estefan. All you had to do was cut out the ad, pick your favorite twelve albums, mail the whole thing in with a shiny penny, and a month later, you’d open your mailbox to find the 8-tracks, or records, or cassettes, or CDs sitting there, ready to be played. It was great!

All they asked in return was that for the next year or so, you purchase another album once a month for full price. And if you forgot each month to make your pick? Then you learned a new term. “Negative Option Billing.”

If we’re being honest here, most people took the 12 albums and ran. They never gave Columbia House another penny. But some people did pay, and that’s all that mattered. Believe it or not, Columbia House and its competitors made bucketloads of money on those few rubes who did manage to stick to the terms of their contract.

And for the folks who never paid? Who cares! Columbia House didn’t have to pay the artists’ royalties for those albums anyway! It was an advertising expense! It’s just like with banks and their overdraft fees. The smart businesses know how to make money off their richest and poorest clients.

Anyway, you have taken on a financial debt. You got the albums. Now you gotta pay. Or don’t. Maybe there won’t be any consequences. Maybe there will. But you got your Beach Boys album, and for now, that’s all that matters.

Reward: You’ve just been trained to lunge for the carrot that has been dangled in front of you, no matter what the cost. If society was still ticking, that’d likely mean you’re about to lead a wage-slave life of ever-increasing debt you can never get out from underneath, culminating in you dying alone in a government-run facility while your meager Social Security checks go straight into the facility’s coffers. That and a cassette copy of Gloria Estefan’s 1989 masterpiece, Cuts Both Ways. My favorite is track number 8. ^[1]

Trivia

The 8th track on Cuts Both Ways is called "Get on Your Feet".

References