“Free” (outside of “free with purchase”) sets off alarms. Free doesn’t just mean free — it means “free, if you give us your email address,” “free as a trial run, then you get a bill,” or “free, then you’ll get a lot of junk mail and spam.”
With the level of marketing awareness most people have, free almost sounds like a ploy of some kind. Why would something be free? What is this, 1950? Did someone accidentally receive a crate of someone else’s merchandise? Is someone going Buddhist?
A magazine I worked for in college found one year that they couldn’t hand out free issues of the magazine to students on campus. Everyone thought there was a hitch of some kind. They didn’t want to deal with the hassle that comes with “free.”
Maybe if they had been “welcome” issues.
