#414 1986 · Silo (electronics retail chain) · Consumer electronics retailcostly-signal
When 35 customers showed up at Silo stores hauling 11,000 real bananas after a TV ad joked stereos cost '299 bananas,' Silo honored the literal deal at a $10,465 loss rather than admit the joke
the problem
TV ad's slang joke ('bananas' for dollars) was taken literally
background
In 1986 Silo, a US home-electronics retail chain, ran a TV commercial in roughly two dozen markets nationwide using 'bananas' as playful slang for dollars, advertising a stereo system for '299 bananas.' The wordplay was meant purely as ad-copy color, the kind of throwaway slang gag common in retail radio and TV spots of the era, with no expectation anyone would treat the number as a literal unit of payment.
The morning after the spot aired, a small number of customers arrived at Silo stores in Seattle and El Paso carrying real bananas — 32 people in Seattle and 3 in El Paso, 35 total — and demanded their stereos in exchange for the fruit, taking the ad's slang at face value and forcing store staff to decide on the spot whether to play along or turn them away.
the move
Rather than refuse the literal reading as an obvious joke gone wrong, Silo's management chose to accept the bananas as payment and hand over the stereos, a decision a company representative later explained by saying the chain wasn't going to spend a fortune on a TV campaign only to make customers who'd taken it at its word feel cheated.
the payoff
Silo took in about 11,000 bananas across the two stores, exchanging each roughly $299-300 stereo for $40-60 worth of fruit, for a total loss of $10,465 on the 35 units — a small, bounded cost against the wire-service and national press coverage the stunt generated, coverage the original ad campaign itself never came close to earning and that is still being retold as marketing folklore four decades later.
what came after
The 'bananas for a stereo' story became a recurring case study in marketing and advertising retrospectives about honoring the literal reading of your own copy, independently fact-checked and rated true by Snopes decades after the fact.
references
- [1]The Stereo System That Cost 299 BananasPriceonomics, 1986priceonomics.com
- [2]Stereo Sold for 299 Bananas (fact-check, rated True)Snopes, 1986snopes.com