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You may consider all of the material here quotable for story purposes. To interview GOOHF creator Randy Cassingham, contact him here.
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Site Home PageWhat is the Message When
People Buy a Million Parody
Cards Allowing the Holder to
"Get Out of Hell Free"?To be sure, there is a message -- and a social phenomenon in what its creator calls "the GOOHF card" (pronounced, of course, "goof card"). It's a story of the rejection of religious intolerance, a statement of "I can think for myself, thank you", and real world "viral marketing" created by a savvy pioneer in online publishing.
The GOOHF card, and the smaller GOOHF sticker.Genesis: Where the Card Came From
GOOHF creator Randy Cassingham writes a weekly "weird news" column called This is True, which tells true stories about how stupid, odd, and human people can be. It's pretty popular -- there are well over 120,000 subscribers to the weekly e-mail edition. Each week there are 7-9 short true stories sourced from legitimate newspapers around the world with a one-liner ending -- Randy's commentary on the story. True (as he calls it for short) has been running online weekly since 1994, making it one of the first for-profit Internet-based publications. Now in its 13th year, True has well over 120,000 subscribers in more than 200 countries. (You can get a free subscription at the web site, or by using the form at the bottom of this page.)
In April 2000, Randy wrote a story about feng shui (the Chinese art of "placement" which supposedly creates a "positive life energy"). It's as brief as most of Randy's stories -- just 87 words (and less than 100 with the title and Randy's tagline commentary). Here it is, in its entirety:
I See the Light!The British Tomato Growers' Association encouraged its members to try using feng shui, an ancient Chinese practice to create harmonious environments by channeling energy flows, to increase the yields of their gardens. That didn't sit well with two employees at Arreton Valley Nurseries on the Isle of Wight. "It put me in conflict with my faith," complains Martin Kelly, who quit the nursery and took his son Paul with him. "I'm not working for a farm that openly claims it relies on a power other than God." (Reuters) ...You mean like the sun?
One of Randy's online readers took exception to the story, saying it was "anti-Christian" and -- without any doubt -- Randy is going to hell for writing it. Randy thought that perhaps a plea to reason would make a difference: he told her that True had a "consulting minister" -- a senior pastor at a New York church -- who not only didn't have a problem with the story from a religious point of view, he thought it was funny. The reader's response? The minister is going to hell too!
Randy thought if a random woman had the power to condemn him and others to hell, he should have the power to reverse her curse: he created the "Get Out of Hell Free" card, modeled closely on the "Get Out of Jail Free" card from the popular and ubiquitous MONOPOLY® board game. Randy figured that the MONOPOLY® card trivialized "getting into trouble" in the game; similarly, his parody of that card blows off busy-body moralists who demand that others follow their arbitrary morality rules -- the card trivializes what they think is the ultimate in "getting into trouble," going to hell for sins that were never mentioned in the Bible.
So Randy had 2,000 cards printed, and then told his readers about how he was condemned to hell -- and showed them his response: the GOOHF card. What happened next was magic.
Readers Go Wild
The response was immediate and intense. When Randy told his readers about the card in May 2000, he offered them to his readers so they too could have a response to people who told them what to think or believe. For $1 (the cost of printing, packing and postage), he'd send them 10 cards. Dollar bills started showing up by the hundreds. The first 2,000 cards were sold out by the third day! And this was by mail order -- at first, Randy didn't even offer them for online purchase! He had 2,000 more cards printed; they were gone by the end of the first week, so he increased the order to 4,000 at a time, and by September the print runs were 10,000 cards at a time. By 2002 his typical order was -- and remains -- 20,000 cards; a print run lasts from four to eight weeks, though on occasion Randy has to call the printer with a 20,000-card order -- when they're already working on a print run that big!
It led to the card's slogan, also coined by Randy: "Sin all you want, We'll print more."
Were these thousands of cards all selling 10 at a time?! No: that was the magic. People didn't want 10 cards, they wanted many, many more: the average order is for 150 cards; many have ordered 1,000 -- and then came back later for more. There's only one reason anyone would buy more than a few: they really are giving them away, but not usually to people who vex them. Rather, the most common reason to give a card away is to make someone's day better -- the store clerk who just dealt with a screaming customer. The waitress whose customer is never satisfied. The fellow employee who needs the message, "I have to deal with our idiot boss too." (Several customers have said they stapled a card to their letter of resignation!)
And yes, they also give them to people who vex them, the moralists who say "You shouldn't be gay!" or "Playing cards are tools of the Devil!" or "You shouldn't hold hands in public!" or "You shouldn't teach evolution!" or "Dancing is immoral!" or "What? You're Jewish/Mormon/Catholic/Protestant/not ELCA?!" No matter what you do, or don't do, are, or aren't, there's someone who thinks you're immoral. The card is the perfect answer to those who would dare to dictate your beliefs.
This stack of mail represents just one weekend's worth of orders during the initial flurry -- about 3,500 cards going as far as Australia. As many as 12,000 cards have been mailed out in just one week.
Yes, but a million cards?! How could they possibly be that popular? It's a question Randy Cassingham has been asked many times. "My best guess," he said, "is this: people are absolutely sick and tired of others telling them what their morals should be, especially when the people doing the telling don't demonstrate good morals themselves. Nosy people with no idea of what you believe in are demanding the right to say what you 'should' do. Yet their own moral leaders are in the headlines month after month after month doing the most repugnant, disgusting, abhorrent and (on virtually anyone's scale) immoral things imaginable, such as the sexual exploitation of children by priests, to offer just one extreme example."
"The sales of the GOOHF cards and other products are just one symptom of people being fed up with sanctimonious buttinskis," he continued. "The cards are, to many, a way of saying 'I'm comfortable in my position, no matter what you think,' and they're popular with open-minded believers and nonbelievers alike."
Another "symptom" of this impatience was revealed December 3, 2002, by George Barna. Barna is a California-based pollster who specializes in religious beliefs -- the Barna Group is the Gallup Poll of the Christian world. They did a survey at the request of the American Family Association, and the results are quite telling: the poll asked Americans who don't consider themselves Christian to express their "impression" of 11 groups of people: positive, negative, or in-between? Evangelical Christians rated 10th -- just above prostitutes, and significantly below Republicans, Democrats, lesbians and Movie and TV performers. Even lawyers came in at #7! (Ministers, though, should take comfort: they came in at #2 -- but it was a distant second behind military officers, who came in first by far).
Why would these Americans think so little of Evangelical Christians? Look at how they often play out in the media: at the funeral of a man who was beaten to death, some of these "loving Christians" were protesting the services with signs reading "God Hates Queers". ("Hint:" Randy editorialized when he read about that -- "hate is not an example of Christian love. Were these same people protesting the trial of the murderer?") Then there are Christian fundamentalist "leaders" like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who raced onto TV two days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to pin the blame for the atrocities not on the terrorists, but rather, as they put it, on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- [we] point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen'."
Barna himself draws this conclusion: "Our studies show that many of the people who have negative impressions of evangelicals do not know what or who an evangelical is," he said in a press release about the survey. "Too often, we develop mental images of others without knowing those people. ...We find that when people examine the foundation of their impressions and then talk to a few people from the groups of which they have a low opinion, they discover that those people are not so bad after all." To that, Randy Cassingham replied, "Funny, but the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them -- that's exactly what they want Evangelical Christians to know too."
"Offline Viral"
We often hear of how things online can "go viral" on the Internet -- something just catches on. A photo gets forwarded a million times, or the link to a great video suddenly shows up in 50 blogs on the same day. The GOOHF card, Randy Cassingham says, is an example of offline viral marketing. Indeed, he thought of it that way on Day 1, back in May 2000, perhaps making it the first online-to-offline viral crossover -- or at least the first successful one. It's why he offered the cards to his readers for the cost of printing and postage!
"I didn't feel a need to make a profit on the cards," Randy says, "because they all have my URL on them. Rather than create a photograph or video for people to pass around online, I created a real object that I knew would be passed around in the real world. And what's better in the 'dotcom' era than to have your URL spread around?" The customers pay the cost of creating the viral object, he says, and they benefit by the good feelings and message that they pass along with the card. "It's a terrific win-win," Randy says. "Not to mention that it works: people wonder who's behind the card, and they check out the site mentioned there. It has led to a lot of traffic, and a lot of new subscribers to my weekly weird news newsletter."
To Get Cards
Order from the front page of this site or send $1 per 10 cards desired to:
Get Out of Hell Free
PO Box 666
Ridgway CO 81432The cards were used as a sort of "relief effort" for the Iraq war, too. Readers contributed to a fund to send more than 21,000 cards to U.S. servicemen and -women deployed in Iraq.
But the love isn't universal. Some people absolutely hate the cards, calling them (just like the original reader) "anti-Christian". Never mind that hundreds of church pastors have ordered the cards themselves. "There are two priests posted at the Vatican -- that I know of -- who have the cards," Randy says. "One even admits he wears his GOOHF t-shirt under his cassock sometimes." Most Christians love the cards, he says. "I'm sure most of the people who order them are Christian." But certain fundamentalists waive that all aside and continue to condemn him, completely missing the entire point, he says. "In This is True, I can smile at the foibles of politicians, criminals, school officials, landlords, cops, military officers, students, bus drivers, athletes, farmers, animals, royalty, conservatives, liberals, and everyone else but Christian fundamentalists," Randy says, "because if I dare to suggest that they are human too, a few crybabies will stamp their feet and shake their Bibles at me, sputtering with quivering, anonymous voices that I'm going to hell. What a sad example of Christianity indeed."
Randy continues: "To be sure, in the grand scheme of things complaints from just a few people now and then is not a big deal; what gets me is that they're not a thoughtful 'I disagree with you, and here's why'," Randy says. "Rather, I tend to get the bit about how 'our merciful God is going to condemn you to suffer in hell for eternity because you do not believe the exact same way that I do'." Does he really think most of the card's buyers are Christian? "Absolutely! Most of the country is, and while we've sold the cards all over the world, quite naturally most of the cards are sold in the U.S. Most of these buyers use their beliefs to enhance their own lives, rather than use them as a weapon to try to condemn or control others. Luckily, most people who believe in God also believe that He has a sense of humor, and know their personal beliefs are not the only way to think."
The limited-edition 'lenticular' (moving image) GOOHF postcard, created to celebrate the millionth card sold. (Flash player plug-in required to see moving image.) The cards have been purchased by buyers in every U.S. state and Canadian province, as well as Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bermuda, Croatia, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Russia, Scotland, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and Turkey -- that we know of. One This is True reader wrote to say he was in a bar in Paris, and a business associate wrote down a phone number for him -- on the back of an orange card. He said he knew what it was before he turned it over.
The GOOHF world expanded in October 2002 with the introduction of a t-shirt with the card image on it. By this time, Randy had set up online ordering. Good thing: in the first six weeks 1,100 shirts flew out the door. "The shirts outsold my This is True books that holiday season," Randy says. Later, stickers were added to the line-up, as well as coffee mugs, credit-card-like plastic GOOHF cards, laser-engraved rosewood gift boxes, and, to celebrate the millionth card sold, a "lenticular" (moving image) post card. "It has become its own little cottage industry for us," Randy says. "I have some more goodies in the works too."
"But the best part," he says, "is that it supports my This is True newsletter and its main goals, which are to entertain people first, and make them think as a close second. That the card can also do both upon its first glance is probably the real secret to its success."
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Is the price really still the same as in 2000 -- $1 for 10 cards?
A: Yes: although postage costs have risen steadily in the past few years, we have countered that expense by printing 20,000 cards at a time, which brings down the cost to compensate.
Q: Wait: Over a million cards, at $1 for 10? That's more than $100,000!
A: Why yes, it is! Just remember that by design, the price is meant to cover printing, packing, and postage. The GOOHF cards make up the bulk of our mailings by far, and account for the majority of our five-figure annual postage bill.
Q: I see you have plastic cards, t-shirts, etc. Are those part of the million?
A: No. The figure counts only the original paper card, and only counts those that have been sold -- not the thousands Randy has given away personally. The t-shirts, plastic cards and other items are on top of the million cards.
Q: Who is Randy Cassingham?
A: Randy, the creator of the GOOHF cards, is a successful online columnist and the inventor of for-profit subscription e-mail publishing. He writes and publishes This is True, a compilation of weird-but-true newspaper tories with added commentary. True is one of the first online subscription features (established 1994) and is still going strong. Randy is a former software engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and is also the author of the True Stella Awards, a look at ridiculous-but-true lawsuits and their impact on society. The TSA book was published in Fall 2005 by Dutton (a division of Penguin Books). It was reissued Fall 2006 in paperback.
Q: Does Parker Brothers object to the cards?
A: Hasbro, which bought out Parker Brothers (and its popular MONOPOLY® board game), indeed objected to the GOOHF card. However, it is a strongly established right in the U.S. to create parodies of popular culture; the GOOHF card is clearly a parody of the MONOPOLY® "Get Out of Jail Free" card. Hasbro demanded that we stop selling the cards, but we refused -- it is our right to produce parodies. But for clarity, each GOOHF card contains a disclaimer noting it is not affiliated with Hasbro's MONOPOLY® in any fashion.
Q: Who buys GOOHF cards?
A: Just about anyone and everyone: ministers, lawyers, cops, firefighters, computer geeks, truck drivers -- or, more simply, regular people from all over the world.
Q: The mail-order address is PO Box 666. Is that on purpose?
A: Absolutely. We were randomly assigned Box 668, but when Randy saw Box 666 was available, he asked for it. It seems to be the perfect address for the cards -- a wink toward the absurdity of taking things too literally.
Q: I'm a reporter. Is there a reproducible image of the card available?
A: Contact Randy Cassingham with questions and any press support needs.