Editing 2895: Treasure Chests

{{comic
| number    = 2895
| date      = February 16, 2024
| title     = Treasure Chests
| image     = treasure_chests_2x.png
| imagesize = 287x488px
| noexpand  = true
| titletext = [earlier] "Your vintage-style handmade chest business is struggling. But I have a plan."
}}

==Explanation==
This comic features [[Black Hat]] proposing a way to create significant business for a "lawn care company", for which the comic narrator has an attachment (perhaps owner or employee), albeit in an extremely unethical and possibly illegal manner which is very much congruent with Black Hat's character of being a '[[classhole]]'.

His plan is to create the conditions for a large number of lawns all over a certain town to be dug out by random members of the public, via the motivation of a large potential reward for digging up a lawn (in this case, a chest with $1,000 in the form of silver and gold coins). By filming the burials in such a way that the subsequently posted videos are tantalizingly open to many interpretations as to where they actually were, and then waiting a year to let time obscure any obvious signs of disturbed earth and digging, he encourages feverish speculation among treasure-hunters about the location of the chests, and an incentive to dig up lawns more or less at random, with or without permission.

It is also possible that waiting a year leaves time for one or more chests to have been discovered prior to the 'start' of the deliberate competition to find them. So long as all three weren't (publicly) discovered, it leaves open the possibility that those competing to find the 'unfound' chests will continue with their efforts to find what is now unfindable, prolonging the exercise beyond the point at which all chests could be known to be discovered and that there are no more chances to gain their riches. Indeed, there is nothing to stop Black Hat from simply digging the chests back up once the videos have been filmed, so that he is not out $3000 and there is nothing to find, prolonging the search indefinitely.

The many homeowners who soon find themselves with ruined lawns would then proceed to contact the lawn care company in order to fix the broken lawns, thus making the business lots of money. For the maximum initial expenditure of $3000 (plus the cost of the containers, and other trivial overheads), a need for significant remediation work will be generated. According to the caption below the panel, the proposal set out by Black Hat turns out to be VERY profitable and EXTREMELY effective. It would be cheaper than most other forms of effective advertisement, such as {{w|Flyer (pamphlet)#Distribution and use|mass-flyering the catchment area}} or buying advertising time/space in traditional media, whilst being much more penetrating and focused than any but the most sophisticated (and expensive) forms of online advertising. As long as the 'competition' isn't actually linked to the lawn-care businesss, it also has the advantage that it can create a near maximum potential demand for the service without risking {{w|media fatigue}} and perhaps aversion to the product being advertised. There is no indication that this will be <em>ever</em> be promoted as the company's very own competition, which would probably actively drive the numerous victims of the scheme to find (or found!) rival businesses, not to mention risk the instigation of claims for recompense through civil liability.

It is unclear why Black Hat doesn't just film videos pretending to bury the chests, but not actually burying anything. This way, he would only need one chest, not lose any money, and also people would perpetually hunt for the chests as no one would be aware they don't exist, and just think that they dug up the wrong lawn

The title text shows how Black Hat, before sharing his proposal in this comic, saw a struggling business that made vintage-style handmade chests and cooked up the lawn care plan as a way to boost their sales by generating demand for chests from the lawn company. Sales of three chests doesn't seem a significant uplift for the chest company, which potentially implies that Black Hat has pushed his  treasure hunt scheme to multiple lawn care companies, perhaps each in a different town, each buying three chests. One can only speculate about what other companies he may have enticed to take part in this {{tvtropes|ChainOfDeals|chain of deals}}, at each point being paid for the pleasure (and keeping the accumulated proceeds), leaving arbitrary amounts of disruption in his wake.

As of the time of posting, [https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/silver-price/ silver prices] were roughly $23 per ounce / $8 per cm^3, and [https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/gold-price/ gold prices] were roughly $2000 per ounce / $1250 per cm^3. This means that even the fairly small chest Black Hat has procured, which appears to be around 4 litres, would be very empty if holding $1000 in pure gold or silver coins. Accounting for space between coins, a $1000 chest entirely containing silver coins would be only be filled between 1/8-1/4 liter / 1/2-1 cup, whereas $1000 would only constitute a single medium/large gold coin or a few small ones. However, 'gold' and 'silver' coins may simply refer to higher value coins made either partially from gold and silver, or from some other alloys that give gold and silver colourings. The value might also be based on the face value of gold and silver coins that differ from the market value based on the metal content, or Black Hat might be using another dollar currency rather than the US dollar.  If using U.S. currency, he probably filled it with {{w|Dollar_coin_(United_States)|dollar coins}}, which currently exist in both gold (the "Sacagawea dollar", the "Native American series", and the "Presidential dollar") and silver (the "American Silver Eagle", the "Susan B. Anthony dollar", the "Morgan" and "Peace" dollars, and the extra-large "Eisenhower dollar") colorations.  1,000 dollar coins would nicely fill a small chest and look impressive enough.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

:[Black Hat is holding a treasure chest in one hand and pointing with a stick to a poster that features a shovel at the top, three circled X's below it, and five question marks around them.]
:Black Hat: First, I'll fill three of these chests with $1,000 each in small silver and gold coins, and take videos of them being buried in unidentified lawns around town.
:Black Hat: Next year, I post the videos.
:Black Hat: Then we sit back and let the local kids do the rest.

:[Caption below the panel:]
:The proposal for creating business for our lawn care company was unorthodox but ''extremely'' effective.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Black Hat]]