this weekHanding It to You  September 2, 2004  Giving Away the
Razor, Selling the Blades  The curious strategy of loss-leader
marketing  One day I opened up my mailbox, and there inside was
a box from Gillette containing a brand-new Mach3 razor. It
turned out that the box was addressed to my neighbor, which is
just as well: the idea of shaving with a triple-blade razor
seemed a bit—excuse me—over the edge. That was just a few years
ago, and since then, the Mach3 has been superseded by models
with four and five blades, with or without a vibrating
feature—the mind boggles. But the twin-blade Gillette
SensorExcel razor I used for many years also came in the mail
for free, and also, coincidentally, wasn’t addressed to me—I got
it from a friend who didn’t want it. Still, exactly as Gillette
hoped, I spent many, many dollars over the years on their
obscenely overpriced blades before breaking down and buying an
electric razor. Like countless other people, I was sucked in by
the “give-away-the-razor-sell-the-blades”