Farrell's Ice Cream

Last Updated: February 6, 2006

"Farrell's ice cream stores ran a promotion in which customers could get free ice cream on their birthdays. Farrell's then sold its collection of names and dates to the U.S. Selective Service, which proceeded to remind the eighteen-year-old birthday boys to register for the draft."

from Marketing Madness, by Michael F. Jacobson and Laurie Ann Mazur, Westview, 1995, pg 121,
quoting Erik Larson, The Naked Consumer, Holt, 1992, pg 99.

I received a follow up on this from "rferguss" who suggested looking at
http://www.snopes.com/spoons/noose/draft.htm
This URL is now dead; Scott Karlin sent me a new URL that works:
http://www.snopes.com/military/icecream.htm Excerpts from this article:

Selective Service was forced to acknowledge that in 1983 it paid a mailing list broker $5,687 for 167,000 names of other birthday club boys who would be 18 that year so that it could remind them to register. Farrell's Ice Cream Parlor Restaurant, a large national chain, was "outraged" to discover its list has been passed to the government without permission.
The broker is authorized only to let people use the list with our written permission," said Alexander Hehmeyer, senior vice president and general counsel of Farrell's. "We have no record of any request by government. We were shocked and outraged; we would never give permission for its use by a government agency.
The list broker, George Mann Associates of New Jersey, acknowledged it had allowed Selective Service to buy the list without first checking with Farrell's. When this came to light, Selective Service threw out the names it had so harvested as, without Farrell's express permission to it, they shouldn't have had the use of them.