Scotland Adds iPods to Menu

I don't care what Bill Gates says. We're nothing more than little peas in Apple's pod.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based computer maker has created a market so eager to buy its digital music player that everyone from public health do-gooders to nefarious online marketers is capitalizing on the knowledge that people will do just about anything to get their hands on one.

Just look at Scotland. Whatever romantic notions we American descendants of the clans imagine, our lions of the north lately are more often thought of as connoisseurs of the deep-fried Mars bar (and deep-fried haggis, pizza and Scotch eggs). The region's own outgoing chief medical officer said that it could take an entire generation to dispel Scotland's reputation of being a land of binge drinkers, heavy smokers and heart-disease sufferers.

Enter Apple.

The Scotsman newspaper last week reported that Glasgow's school system is offering rewards -- the iPod chief among them -- to bribe their secondary school students into eating healthier foods: "The award-winning Fuel Zone Points Rewards Scheme aims to promote a good diet among teenage pupils, with those who choose a healthy option rewarded with points which go towards prizes, such as iPod music players, Xbox computer consoles, tickets for the cinema and book tokens. The experiment was introduced 12 months ago in all of Glasgow's 29 secondary schools."

The paper focused on 14-year-old Akil Memishi, whose family came to Scotland as refugees from Kosovo, as well as 13-year-old Katie Burns. Both students won awards for buying into the program. Katie chose movie tickets, but Memishi went with the iPod. Either way, both are putting in overtime as Apple's smiling Scottish shills. Do you think they'd be smiling so much if they knew how many iPods they could buy with the money that people normally get paid for modeling?

The program is available to approximately 30,000 students, the Daily Mail reported. The paper also quoted a spokeswoman for the school system as saying that cheating is impossible: "The swipecard has the pupil's photo on it and the dinner ladies who swipe them obviously know who is who," she said.

The London Times described the point system that students must satisfy to win an iPod. It's quite specific, though I'm happy to report that it's simpler than the British Airways Executive Club reward points system: "At the 'Fuel Zones', school dining halls, the pupils receive points for choosing items such as salad (15 points), pasta (15 points) and water (15 points), for example, instead of chips (nil points), beef burger or pizza (3 points) and Irn Bru (nil points). The points are accumulated on a term-by-term basis and can be redeemed for items ranging from cinema tickets (850 points) to the latest iPod (4,000 points) and Xbox games consoles (3,000 points)." (If you click the Irn Bru link above, you'll see an iPod giveaway promotion on the "It's Phenomenal" page...)

The Times noted that the most lucrative/popular choice is the Vital Mix for £1.15 ($2.10), comprising soup, a stuffed pita or sandwich, yogurt, raisins or fruit and a healthy drink, such as milk. Suck down 100 Vital Mixes and you get the 4,000 points. The paper also pointed out that if the 10,500 students now opting for healthy food were eligible for an iPod, it would cost the city $3.7 million: "But Fergus Chambers, head of Glasgow's £119 million ($218.3 million) school catering service, said that that would never happen. 'If things started to go crazy, we'd amend the rules,' he said."

The Herald newspaper's editorial board endorsed the program: "Bribery? Well, why not? If supermarkets and garages can woo adult customers with loyalty cards, why should our public services not use the same positive reinforcement technique to wean children off unhealthy food?"

Why not indeed? Bribery not only persuades some kids to do the right thing without having to wonder why, it motivates the other children who surely will develop an inferiority complex as their increasingly svelte buddies parade around with their new toy. Note for a news story one year from today: Glasgow's outraged schoolteachers confiscate record numbers of iPods while trying to get their slender, attractive students to pay attention for a minute or two.

iPods: Gratis or Gratuitous?

When I visited a government trade show a few weeks back (please, don't stop reading!) I noticed that nearly every company's booth featured a drawing to win a free iPod -- a rather effective ploy by the exhibitors to keep attendees from contracting narcolepsy. The Glasgow trick clearly works with us too. All a business needs to do these days is offer a free iPod and it can sell just about whatever it wants. Just ask the Bucks County Courier Times just outside Philadelphia, or Citibank.