One of the women in my super-secret writing group alerted me to this the other day, and I'm not sure how I feel about it.
Tcho, a chocolate company in San Francisco, is looking for testers for their chocolate. Here's the description from their website:
"Beta is a fun opportunity for YOU to participate directly in designing your next chocolate. When we launched our first chocolate in December 2007, we wanted to engage with our first tasters by requesting their feedback. Since a lot of us have tech backgrounds, we adopted a familiar idea: we encouraged our users to help us make the chocolate they wanted, in much the same way software developers engage beta testers. We called what we were doing Beta Chocolate, and put it in plain brown bags with rubber stamps to identify the contents and batch numbers. Beta Tasters are invited to submit feedback (on both Version A and Version B of each Beta Pack) on our website’s feedback form."
Sounds kinda cool, right? Yeah, well, the only thing is, you have to pay for this privilege: $5 for two 25 gram bars. Still sounds okay, until you do the math-- 25 grams is less than an ounce. Then, after eating it, you have to give the company your feedback. Somehow this just doesn't seem right. I shouldn't have to pay you to do your research and development. It should be the other way around. There are such things as professional taste testers after all. (ahem.) Maybe I'm being an old curmudgeon about this. What do you think?
2 comments:
I participated in their initial "beta" program ... which was basically the ability to purchase stuff that wasn't good yet.
I don't plan on doing it again.
Very interesting. That's a very different idea than the normal "beta" testing I'm familiar with. I agree with you and do not like this program at all.
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