In February 2006, somebody spent two days writing 100 letters to 100 companies for one reason: to see which corporations would send him free stuff.
The name came from the cost of a roll of 100 stamps: $39. The author later admitted the real cost was closer to $52 after envelopes, paper, and the domain name, but by then the title had already won.
All 100 letters went into the mail on Friday, February 24, 2006 at 9:00 AM.
Then the website became the scoreboard.
Corporate customer service as an Internet spectator sport
The experiment lists every company, the product involved, whether a response arrived, what the company sent, and the actual letter used to provoke it.
Some letters are ordinary compliments or requests. Others get progressively stranger as the author realizes that writing 100 polite corporate letters would be unbearable.
Companies included food brands, hotels, rental-car firms, manufacturers, restaurants, and household-product companies. The author later singled out letters to Carmex, Nylabone, PowerBar, Energizer, Long John Silver’s, and Kentucky Fried Chicken among his favorites.
The first freebies started arriving March 2.
By the time the experiment officially ended on May 18, the site reported more than 60 responses, with 35 companies sending free products worth roughly $275.
Financially, this was not genius once the author’s time was included.
As a web artifact, it is excellent.
The whole project belongs to a particular Internet era when the natural response to a dumb personal question was not to make a five-second video about it. You bought a domain, made a table, documented every result, and left the entire experiment online for strangers twenty years later.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains plenty of sites created from exactly that impulse: I wonder what happens if I do this?
The $39 Experiment answered its question with envelopes, stamps, coupons, dog toys, snacks, and one beautifully unnecessary website.