Illustrations by Debbie Tilley

Winners Circle. The name has marketing appeal. And if we weren’t all winners, we wouldn’t be assembled on this balmy spring afternoon at Via de la Valle to learn about the Winners Circle Vacation Time Sharing Resort. The Del Mar racetrack is a block south, the ocean a few streets west. The temporary trailer on the far side of the pool is jammed with couples, children, and singles; their attire ranges from shorts to business suits. More people are being led into the trailer by a smiling sales force. The sales director apologizes for the standing-room-only situation. An affable young man wearing a suit and tie greets the audience. “Hi. My name is Ken and I’ll be your speaker for the next five minutes,” he says with a smile. Ken explains that the time-share concept of purchasing exclusive rights to use a converted motel suite for a one- or two-week period annually was conceived in Europe in the Sixties. “In the Seventies the idea became popular in the United States as the means to make the most of vacation dollars,” he says. “Today there are time-share units available in forty countries and six continents. Del Mar is one of the most sought-after vacation spots in the world.” Spontaneous applause.

Illustrations by Debbie Tilley

Our next treat is a twelve-minute film. Glorious Technicolor sweeps the mountains, canyons, lakes, rivers, valleys, deserts, beaches, swimming pools, tennis courts, Jacuzzis, and all the fruited plains and prairies of the United States. While the camera pans past smiling couples splashing in the surf, a facsimile of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s version of “America the Beautiful” intrudes in full voice. More spontaneous applause. Enough to make you want to write a check.

But when the moment of truth arrives eyeball to eyeball with a salesman whose slick smile turns nervous, a slight sweat breaking out above his upper lip, things get tough. “We're ninety-six percent sold. These units won’t last, you know. This offer is good for today only,” he warns.

“I can’t sign any contract without having my attorney look over the paperwork,” the potential customer demurs.

Recognizing an adversary, the salesman suddenly turns surly. “Do you always take your lawyer along on vacations?” he asks brusquely.

“This is a legal contract for a piece of real estate,” she counters.

“Okay, okay! Go to the trailer on your right and give them this slip. They'll have a free gift waiting for you,” he says with resignation, barely containing his disgust as he rushes off to confront another customer.

She leaves the trailer with a gas barbecue, which she puts in the back of her Mustang. Then she heads north, to the San Clemente Inn, to score another freebie at yet another time-share resort.

At time-share resorts throughout the county, similar scenes are reenacted every few hours, filling the highways with housewares hustlers driving from pitch to pitch — from Casa de la Playa in La Jolla to the Breakers in Pacific Beach, to Lakeside, to Julian, all over Southern California. In their glove compartments are invitations, invariably something like the one from a resort near Riverside: “We have your television reserved and waiting for you at Naco West’s Wilderness Lakes. There is no obligation. All we ask is that you visit Wilderness Lakes, attend a sales presentation, and take a courteous guided tour (approximately 90 minutes) of this unusually beautiful camping resort.” The fine print reads, “Anyone not of legal age to contract, or families who have visited our office in the past six months, are ineligible. Identification along with a major credit card or checkbook will be required.”

Something for nothing. How sweet. Maybe it all begins for the seeker of freebies at an early age. The first free ice cream cone at the local Baskin-Robbins may start him on his way. When a kid figures out how to beat the system by stuffing the entry box with a variety of birthdates during a particular year, he gains an edge over the others; his deviousness nets him free ice cream cones several times a year. From then on, he learns that the more he beats the system, the easier it gets.

One such person is Scott (not his real name), who does occasional gardening only when he is desperate for pocket money. More often, he can be found pilfering his parents’ junk mail — easy enough, since the twenty-eight-year-old lives in their La Jolla garage amid a pile of items he’s amassed during the past five years he’s been attending several time-share promotional seminars a week. His friends say he’s obsessed with collecting these material goods — car stereos, cameras, TVs, VCRs, Tupperware, gourmet carving knives, clock radios, tape recorders, and cordless telephones — for which he has no use.

Recently Scott persuaded a friend to accompany him to Happy Trails, an RV park fifty miles from nowhere. “Actually, the place, whose major selling point is that Roy Rogers has a financial interest in it, is thirty miles dead east of Chula Vista,” says Scott’s friend, who describes that particular adventure as the worst day in his life. “It was almost a two-hour drive each way from La Jolla. We had a two-hour wait before the presentation until enough suckers assembled, and then the actual presentation took at least an hour. Meanwhile, we hung around drinking the beer that was sold on the premises for a dollar a can. The total time investment cost us nearly seven hours each, and the grand payoff for all that time and gas expense was a cheap 35mm camera,” he recalls. “The following weekend [in a different scheme] Scott conned some girl to pose as his wife. They got a free weekend in Idaho for pretending to be interested in purchasing half an acre next to a cesspool.”

Not all time-share addicts are people on the edges of society. Besides retirees, some of those who attend these events are working professionals who say they are willing to take a drive, listen to a presentation, and receive a gift just to kill time. “Every time we receive an invitation to attend a time share, we go,” says a recent Eastern European immigrant who wants to be called Boris in this story. “As long as it’s on the weekend. During the week we both work.” As a result, the couple (he’s an engineer and she’s a medical secretary) has an enormous collection of grandfather clocks, luggage, sleeping bags, and appliances that clutter their University City home. So far they haven’t been able to resist an invitation. During their last visit to Naco West’s Wilderness Lakes near Riverside, which cost them each about six or seven hours of their weekend time, they acquired a five-inch indoor/outdoor black-and-white TV, which takes ten batteries to operate. “We haven’t used it yet because we need to get an adapter,” explains Boris’s wife, Ludmila, “and that will cost us thirty-five dollars. Our invitation claimed that' the retail value of the TV was $169.95, but we saw the same thing at the Price Club for fifty dollars.”

Ludmila’s husband laughs when he tells about their initial visit to a time-share resort on a golf course near Escondido. “They pressured us and we were impressed and right on the spot, we signed the papers.” But the following morning when the euphoria had cooled, the couple remembered that they didn’t even play golf. “So we went back to Escondido the next day and we pleaded temporary insanity. We got out of the deal, but it was a lot of trouble,” Ludmila recalls.

Boris and Ludmila are protected by a seventy-two-hour recision law in California written with such impulse buyers in mind. Still, they are the type of consumers time-share resorts rely upon, as is explained by a former salesman who sold time shares at the Capri-by-the-Sea in Pacific Beach (and who wishes to remain anonymous). “Before I sold time shares I was a Fuller Brush man for about five years,” he says. “Both operate on the knowledge that a certain percentage of people feel a moral obligation to purchase something from you once they’ve accepted a gift from you. In Fuller brushes the percentage was higher, of course, but even in time shares, about fifteen percent bought. When I was selling time shares. I’d see the same people coming back. These were people who put no cash value on their time.”

Danny (not his real name) is a real estate agent who is one of those who feel no moral obligation to buy anything, nor does he put much cash value on his time. “It’s therapeutic for me to take a drive up into the mountains or out to the desert where these time-sharing promos are. It’s good for my soul to get the opportunity to say no to someone else after clients have been saying no to me for weeks, especially since residential real estate has been so slow. At the end of the day I come home with a set of Corning Ware or some carving knives or a hibachi, and I feel that my day hasn’t been wasted, it’s been a better than break-even day,” he says. Although the thirty-year-old bachelor never cooks, he says he likes having these things around his Pacific Beach apartment. “When I get duplicates, I either save them to give as Christmas or wedding gifts or I sell them at a garage sale or a swap meet.”

When he applied for an American Express credit card in 1979, Danny says it was a signal to corporate America that he would be a conspicuous consumer. ”My name got on everyone’s list and every day I’d come home to at least one invitation, sometimes more. I wound up renting a post office box to handle the overflow. These presentations I go to generally last about two hours, but after going to them for six years I’ve learned how to keep my participation down to about an hour. What I do is arrive half an hour late so I miss the introduction. I sit through the promo film, but when the salesman has me in the closing booth I waste no time in telling him that I’m a real estate salesman. I’m here looking around for a friend , or for a customer, I say. Then he can’t wait to get rid of me and jump on someone else.

“Free hotel weekends are fine,” he continues. “I’ve been to Vegas, Palm Springs, Puerto Vallarta, and Lake Tahoe for weekends and the hotels are all paid for. Not meals, though, so I have to scrounge around looking for a happy hour. For the price of a beer, I virtually eat dinner. I don’t ever go to a restaurant and buy dinner. That’s a rule. Between investment society meetings and meetings hosted by termite inspectors and title reps and escrow companies, I never have to worry about breakfast, either. Right now Douglas Ford is offering a gift certificate to spend a couple of nights in Mexico just for test driving a car. It’s written in my appointment book of things to do next week. I can’t resist. You have to have an optimistic nature, I think, to keep taking advantage of these things,” he says.

How does Danny handle the high-pressure tactics? “After doing it all these years, I’m numb. It’s like being in a hypnotic trance. I just keep repeating ‘no’ over and over until they finally leave me alone. Hey, I got a Lake Tahoe vacation because I allowed a Kirby salesman to come over to my apartment, toss some dirt on my carpet, vacuum it up, and demonstrate the wonders of a machine that I had no intention of buying. It took an hour out of my life, but I was rewarded with two nights in Tahoe for me and a friend. No, it didn’t include air fare,” he laughs. “I had to scrape up my pennies to fly there, but for me it was worth it. It’s emotionally satisfying to get something for nothing in a no-free-lunch world.”

Lenny is a middle-age engineer who hasn’t had a job, by choice, for fifteen years. Nor does he intend to be employed ever again. When he was in his thirties, Lenny (which is not his real name) made some prudent investments that yielded enough monthly interest for him to live modestly in a Pacific Beach apartment without having to report to a job. He doesn’t live modestly, though — he lives handsomely. Lenny supplements his monthly income with some highly selective freebies. “I go where I want, eat and drink well, all on very little money,” he says. This requires research, of course, but since Lenny isn’t employed, he’s got plenty of time to devote to hedonistic pursuits. For instance, he attends theater three or four nights a week when he’s in town, though he’s never bought a theater ticket. “What I do is get on all the theater managers’ lists to be an usher. In exchange for twenty or thirty minutes of my time handing out programs and showing people to their seats, I see the best plays in town.”

Lenny also makes sure that he signs the guest register at every art gallery in San Diego to insure his place on the invitation list for exhibition openings when champagne and an elaborate spread are served. He never misses an SDG&E shareholders’ meeting breakfast. “Great American First Savings puts out a nice breakfast, too,” he says. Just recently he attended an all-day freebie sponsored by one of the recently established institutes at UCSD. “It was a think-tank setting. They served a great lunch and at 5:00 p.m. there were plenty of cocktails and the kind of hot hors d’oeuvres that were the equivalent of dinner. Of course, you need an active grapevine to find out about all these freebies,” Lenny admits, “and to get connected, you’ve got to spend some time and make a few phone calls.”

After fifteen years of polishing his art, Lenny feels that happy hours are for amateurs. “That’s an Everyman pursuit,” he says, “but for the more advanced, figuring the angles is the real fun. The more innovative and challenging the freebie, the more interested I become ”

When it comes to meeting challenges, nobody is better than local attorney Mike Schaefer. The former San Diego city councilman and landlord explains that the famous sneakins for which he has received much publicity were done out of necessity. “Not financial necessity,” says Schaefer, whose real estate dealings have made him both prosperous and controversial. “For example, last summer I was perfectly willing to pay the face value of a hundred dollars for an Olympics ticket, but when the opening ceremonies began, the scalpers still wanted several hundred dollars for a ticket. I felt that was too much. When I saw an open gate, I followed some children in who were there to see their mother. Of course I didn’t go out of my way. I was there and had I been able to buy a ticket for a hundred dollars, I would have,” he says.

“It’s a matter of being inventive and recognizing and seizing opportunities when they present themselves,” he adds. Another example of Schaefer’s inventiveness occurred at the 1980 presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C. Schaefer wasn’t deterred from attending that event just because he hadn’t been invited. “One of the local papers did a write-up on a couple who had saved five or six thousand dollars to go to Washington. I was convinced — actually it became a challenge — that I could do the same thing for next to nothing. I did.” He laughs. “I wore the same uniform — a trenchcoat — as the CBS cameramen wore. When they went walking up front, I put my hand to my ear like I was the audio man and I managed to walk in right behind them. When the crew was told to sit down, I spotted one empty seat. It was in the third row, directly in front of Johnny Carson — between Rums ford and Kissinger. You know who was sitting right behind me? The guy in charge of the inauguration.”

Jennifer first got hooked at age seven when she got a free transistor radio as a result of winning a park-sponsored sack race. Because her mother tried to dilute the joy by reminding her daughter that nothing is free (“Someone had to pay for that radio, Jennifer” her mother said), Jennifer set out to prove her mother wrong. That same year, the resourceful second-grader found a coupon (in a copy of her brother’s Boy's Life magazine) that offered a booklet called 1001 Things You Can Get Free, and she quickly sent for it. “When it came, I sent out 1001 postcards with my name and address to all 1001 places to get all those items free. I can’t remember which was better — going to the mailbox every day and finding a freebie just for me, or anticipating what was in that mailbox. The stuff kept coming and coming. There was a pair of gold-colored wings from an airline company, a membership card certifying that I was a doughnut-dunker, and a gigantic chart showing how forests grow. I even remember getting a pink-colored pamphlet describing the female reproductive system. They also sent me a free sanitary napkin,” Jennifer recalls.

Today, at twenty-four, she operates a no-overhead mail order marketing business from her Ocean Beach apartment. Because her free-lance life is independent of time clocks and an eight-to-five office routine, she can devote as much time as is necessary to her childhood passion. “I keep a constant vigil for drawings and sweepstakes. They’re all over this town. San Diego is one of the best places in America for freebies because so many new businesses are opening up here and they’re all offering promotional gimmicks to get you onto their turf."

She has not forsaken sending for things in the mail, though. Even today, her mailbox holds the same surprises that it did when she was an impressionable schoolkid. “Businesses send me free samples of computer paper, floppy disks, leather-bound appointment books, and pens engraved with my name,” she explains. “All I have to do is ask. I also send for free cosmetic samples. I never buy make-up.”

Bored with the art exhibition opening circuit — white wine. Brie, and pseudointellectual chitchat, as she characterizes it — Jennifer has begun to turn her free time and energy into the better payoffs. In 1982, just after she had moved to San Diego, she won an all-expenses-paid trip (for two) to Hawaii for entering a drawing on radio station KCNN (now KPQP). “I was driven to and from airports in limousines,” she remembers. “How did I win? Well, I used visualization. I imagined myself oti the beach at Waikiki, lapping up the sunshine.”

In addition to positive thinking, Jennifer submits multiple entries in a lot of drawings, and the more drawings she enters, the luckier she’s become. “Whenever I hear of a local drawing or sweepstakes,” she says, “I’ll go miles out of my way by bus — no, I haven’t won a car yet. For me, it’s more than a habit or a hobby. It’s a part-time job. I spend hours looking for these things. But I’ve won a complete Hitachi stereo system, a VCR, a stereo cassette deck, $500 cash, and another time I won a check for a hundred dollars. I subscribe to a national contest newsletter which describes contest star qualifications.” According to the newsletter, published in Fernandina Beach, Florida, you’re considered a success in the world of contestants if you’ve won a car, a major trip, and a major ($10,000 or more) cash prize. “And I’m on my way!” Jennifer grins. Going to the supermarket means box tops, refunds, coupons, rebates, sweepstakes entry blanks, and drawings, as well as a quick nosh on free samples of new food products. On the way home, Jennifer often rewards herself with a bouquet of flowers. “No, I don’t buy them. The florist across the street sometimes throws them in the dumpster when they’re still fresh.”

Jennifer’s years of experience have taught her where to expend her energies to best advantage. “I don’t bother with the Publisher’s Sweepstakes anymore because the odds are so low. The esoteric ones, like the Airborne [overnight mail couriers sweepstakes, for which she filled out twenty entry blanks] are easier to win,” she says. “If you win the sweepstakes, you can deduct your expenses — postage and envelopes — from your income taxes. If you don’t win, you can’t deduct anything,” she says. Last month Jennifer won a backpack with a Hershey insignia on it from a national sweepstakes sponsored by the Hershey Chocolate Company. Even though she has never gone backpacking, she’s pleased with the win. “There are some big winners of national sweepstakes in San Diego,” she says. “In 1982 a woman got $50,000 a year for the rest of her life from a Kodak sweepstakes.”

She says her goal is to become a major California lottery winner. At the beginning of the year she entered six state lotteries plus the national lottery in Canada, and she maintains lottery pools with friends in Illinois and in Ohio. “The first week I subscribed to the New Hampshire lottery, I won five dollars, and I guess that was the hook,” she says.

Jennifer agrees with the opinion of Arthur Janov (author of The Primal Scream) that those who are always looking for a bargain (or freebie) feel that life has cheated them. “There’s a high from getting something for nothing, winning a trip, cash, a radio, or even getting free lipstick and eye shadow, and that quick high is a consolation for a less-than-perfect life,” she says. “When I feel blue or un-loved, I look through the catalogues to see what I can get free. I fill out a few entry blanks or sweepstakes forms, I fantasize about what I’ll get, and soon I feel better about myself and the world.”

Currently her attention is turned to game shows. She’s been studying the skills that are required and she’s practicing becoming a television personality. With her intense eyes, dark curly hair, and offbeat good looks, the lanky Midwesterner may have what it takes to impress the producers.

A decade ago a North County real estate broker did. Marty (not his real name) checked through the ads for contestants that appeared — and still do — in the classified section of the Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times, and he went on a quiz show binge. He appeared on Name That Tune, Face the Music, Password, and The New $64,000 Question, and he won all sorts of major appliances, television sets, and cash. On his way to and from the Los Angeles television studios, Marty stops at thrift shops, and he claims he’s made more than $500 on a single weekend from selling what he’s picked up at the shops.

To Marty, who is now in his early forties, it’s a game he’s been playing on and off ever since he graduated with a “useless degree in history” from an Ivy League school in which he was considered a star. “My parents were pushy upwardly mobile types,” he says. “They spoke incessantly about me ‘making it,’ so I resisted. Later I figured out another way to get the bennies. It’s not by working in a large corporation and dropping dead prematurely from stress. Sure, I do all the freebie things in San Diego — coupons, supermarket bingo, happy hours. Maybe there’s an antisocietal theme in this. Maybe the theme is, ‘Let the other suckers break their backs and their spirits in the eight-to-five world. I’ll get what they want, but I’ll get it my way because I’m smarter than they are.’

“As a real estate broker I’m in an ideal position to be on both sides of this issue,” he continues. “About five or six years ago, I was one of the major presenters for San Diego Country Estates. I was an after-dinner speaker. Not only was I well paid, there was a free dinner in it, too. What’s better than outmanipulating the manipulators?” he asks rhetorically.

Being in real estate is perfect for working all the angles of the freebie culture, Marty says. “You’re eligible for the free dinner seminars and free weekend trips.” And when he’s not busy with clients, Marty picks up freebie esoterica, including coupons. As he starts the engine of his aging white Cadillac, he offers a bit of coupon trivia before he drives to his office. “Proctor and Gamble coupons have no expiration date,” he winks.

Ah, coupons. They’ve been around since 1898, when the C.W. Post company sold cereal with penny-off coupons. Today, not only are there national coupon clubs, there are coupon conventions — one was held in San Diego last September — and even coupon crime (forgeries). Of the coupons issued annually in the United States, having face values that total more than $25 billion, only three to five percent are redeemed. Nevertheless, coupons do complicate shopping, and that visible minority has been causing chaos in the aisles and slowing down checkout counter speed so much that a sign posted in the express lane of the Big Bear Market on Adams Avenue reads, “No Coupons.”

San Carlos homemaker Peggy Newman has been collecting coupons for fifteen years. Because there’s an abundance of double coupons here, she considers San Diego the Shangri-La of coupons. By investing several hours a week clipping and organizing coupons by category, subject, and expiration date, and through strategic use of these coupons, she gets lots of free groceries and claims to save approximately $4000 annually on the family food bill. To accommodate the three-year surplus of laundry detergent and the two-year supply of bath soap that Peggy has acquired, her husband has had to build a large pantry in the garage. Peggy’s favorite tale is the one in which she arrived at the checkout counter of a neighborhood supermarket with seventeen bags of one type of cookie and with enough cookie coupons to reduce the total tab to eighty-five cents. “The manager was so impressed,” she recalls, “that he told me to forget about the eighty-five cents.”

Wives and mothers making ends meet are not the only coupon hobbyists. Janet Schechter, for instance, is a twenty-nine-year-old playwright who lives at home with her mother and brother. “Those who are fascinated by numbers and who are good in math can be pulled into coupon craziness because it’s a numbers game,” she explains. “It's a game that only other coupon nuts understand. Last New Year’s Eve, when I misplaced certain coupons that I had been saving in order to pyramid them into getting a week’s worth of club soda free, I became really upset. My sister was in the next room, but I couldn’t tell her how I felt because I knew she wouldn’t understand. So I called my friend in New Orleans even though it was after two in the morning there. I cried about it over the phone because I was so upset. No one but another coupon nut would understand.”

A Mesa College electronics instructor who wishes to remain anonymous says it would never occur to him to go out to dinner without using a two-for-one coupon. “I can’t understand why anyone would pay for two dinners when he can get one free” he says. The college instructor is so taken with coupons that since he founded a young singles group, all the activities he arranges are based on two-fers. “Recently we all went out to dinner and then to the theater on two-for-one coupons ,” he says. After the show had ended and the group had gathered in one of the members’ homes for a late-night party, the college instructor describes the activities as “feverish. . . . Know what we did? We stayed up until four in the morning swapping coupons with each other.”

One of the more recent enticement gimmicks that manufacturers have handed to the consumer/hobbyist is the rebate. Before he received a law degree and a real estate broker’s license, Howard Zlotnick was employed as a taster and evaluator for Foodmaker, Inc. “I actually got paid to travel to various cities and eat restaurant meals.” Zlotnick, a long-time freebie hobbyist and unpaid solitary vigilante, is peeved that many manufacturers who offer rebates that entice the consumer to make the initial purchase are two-faced. “They use deceptive advertising, and the come-on is usually in large bold print. But once the purchase is made, everything possible is done to hamper and discourage the customer from actually applying for and receiving the rebate, based on the premise that most people who buy the product will not actually apply for the rebate,” he complains. But Zlotnick always does.

When he isn’t in his Kensington office or in court representing clients, Zlotnick spends hours steaming off labels, filling out forms, squinting at the fine print, licking postage stamps and envelopes, and everything else entailed in applying for the one-dollar to ten-dollar rebate that the manufacturer promises will arrive within four to six weeks. “Conair offered a five-dollar rebate and an additional five-dollar super rebate on a make-up mirror, so I bought it for my daughter,” he recalls. “But when I tried to read the rebate coupons, my eyes teared and I got a headache. Much of the print for the rebate instructions was in five-point type and I needed a magnifying glass to read it. This is fifty-percent smaller type than the legal minimum allowed for certain paragraphs in retail installment contracts in California, by the way. I also got upset because the dates for applying for the two rebates differed as well as the proof required. The instructions were vague and ambiguous, which is typical of rebate instructions that also insist that failure to follow instructions exactly will void the offer and no rebate will be forthcoming. I found an 800 number for Conair, and when I called to complain, they admitted receiving many complaints. They said a mistake was made in Korea where the forms were printed. They were waiting for a corrected batch to come from Korea. When I suggested they could get it printed at PIP, I was told I’d have to talk to the vice president. But when I told the voice on the other end of the phone that I was an attorney, I got a rebate check two days later without having to jump through all those hoops!”

Some of his other recent accomplishments include a forty-dollar rebate on a Uniden cordless phone and a forty-dollar rebate on a convection oven. When hair dryers were on sale with handsome rebates, Zlotnick couldn’t resist buying four of them. He gave them as gifts and then requested that the recipients return the gift boxes to him so that he could apply for the ten-dollar rebate on each. At present the rebate vigilante is annoyed with Thrifty Drug’s recent advertisement for a tube of glue for a dollar. “In large print a one-dollar manufacturer’s rebate was announced.” Zlotnick says. “ ‘The net cost is zero,’ said the ad in bold print. We all know that it costs a twenty-two-cent stamp plus time to send in for the rebate, but this manufacturer demanded a stamped, self-addressed envelope, therefore costing forty-four cents to retrieve a dollar.” Nevertheless, Zlotnick complied.

“Sometimes stores don’t have the required coupon available at the time of sale,” he continues, “so I’ve had to make several trips just to get the coupon. Once, when I finally got hold of the rebate coupon, the offer had expired.” He adds that he’s written to manufacturers on legal stationery threatening lawsuits. “I send out quite a few Z-grams, short for Zlotnickgrams, trying to get these manufacturers to stop trying to con us.”

Besides being an admitted rebate nut, Zlotnick is an auction addict. “Nearly ten years ago I met a fellow at the Leo Edge Auction on El Cajon Boulevard who was a fanatic contest enterer. He had recently retired from the Navy and was living in a crummy one-room studio at a run-down place south of Broadway. To keep busy, he’d spend several hours every morning entering Safeway contests. He’d submit 300 entries and distribute them equally among all the Safeway stores in San Diego and L.A. counties,” Zlotnick remembers. “In fact, he had formed a network with several others who lived in North County and in L.A. He’d send them a batch of entries and they’d visit the Safeways in their areas, depositing some of the entries in each of the stores; in return, he’d do the same with their entries in the San Diego-area Safeways. During the time I knew him, he was averaging two or three free calculators per week along with several other prizes of modest value, and this was very satisfying for him. It was an achievement of sorts.

“Although Safeway contests were his specialty, this guy entered national contests, too,” Zlotnick says. “When he won the $25,000 Pledge Sweepstakes grand prize, he had them ship all that furniture — mostly Thomasville and Lane — directly from Michigan to Leo Edge’s auction. Edge told me about it, so I rushed over and bought most of it for ten cents on the dollar.”

Why he indulges himself in such a time-consuming hobby instead of turning his full attention to courtroom trials that generate a much higher hourly rate of pay is a puzzle that Zlotnick himself ponders. “I don’t know,” he shrugs. “It must be a compulsion. I don’t want to keep doing this, but I suppose I get the same kind of satisfaction from mowing my own lawn when I could get a kid to do it for a few dollars.

“My brother has a huge medical practice in San Francisco,” he continues. “He earns three times more than I do, yet he figures all the angles to get free cruises by organizing doctors’ groups and spends time strategizing how he can buy toilet paper in bulk without having to pay sales tax on it. He’s worse than I am.”