If you’ve run out of stuff to do in quarantine, have you considered absolutely flooding your inbox with free carpet samples for no good reason? That’s something Imgur user RowdyMcMenace decided to do long before coronavirus was even a twinkle in the devil’s eye, so I’m not sure how things got so out of hand. It seems like it started as a fun at-home project that quickly spun out of control.
In her Imgur post, she writes, “It started off innocently enough. I stumbled across this cool feature on Amazon to get free fabric and carpet swatches and thought ‘these would make a neat cat scratcher and they’re free so…'”
After opening the package, she realized the carpet patches didn’t all quite have the right texture to please her kitty cat, so she thought, what the hell let’s order some more. She went on a clicking and ordering spree, then called it a night. Then the packages started arriving.
“I am on night shift so I was woken up to this,” she wrote, showing off the piles of packages. “The delivery guy is not happy. I swear I didn’t realize I ordered this many and I thought they were all going to be small!!”
Was it all a huge mistake? Maybe, but the cats seem a bit happier:
Variety is the spice of life, even for felines. And RowdyMcMenace was happy to share how to make this happen for you, if it is something you even want:
“Step 1: be a prime member or mooch an account. Then go to the department selection on the home page.”
“Step 2: scroll down to home, open the submenu, and click on furniture.”
“Step 3: scroll almost all the way down until you see this unicorn of free magic and click it so hard!”
“Step ilostcountalready: filter your results. Or don’t. I clearly didn’t. Pick something expensive that you want a piece of and open it.”
“See that colorful sentence that says ‘order a FREE Swatch’? You know what to do. Push it real good.”
“It is $0.00 with free shipping. Now I know what you’re thinking: what’s the catch? Well aside from being the most hated delivery stop in all of Duval county, there are some very small snags. Very small. There is a limit to how many you can put in your cart at a time, and some are ‘add on items’ meaning they only ship free if you make a minimum purchase. Some sellers will stop you from getting more than one identical swatch. That’s really it. Most ship relatively quickly, too.”
Considering how viral these posts went, however, I am wondering if fabric companies have caught on to how easy it is to get free fabric samples for the people with no intention of actually buying anything. It might not be so easy anymore.