Saturday morning at a Texas garden center.
Forty people standing around a folding table while somebody explains why their tomatoes failed last July.
It is free. There is coffee. Nobody is selling anything, at least not visibly.
This looks like community service.
It is actually one of the most efficient customer acquisition strategies in retail, and it is worth understanding because the same mechanism is being used on you constantly, in much higher stakes settings.
Free education creates obligation, expertise and trust simultaneously.
When those three things point at the same store, you do not comparison shop anymore.
Calloway's built a Texas chain partly on this. Let me explain how it works, and then how to tell the good version from the bad one.