BOGOF
noun

- buy one, get one free: a type of special offer used in shops

- an offer in which you buy something and get another of the same thing for no extra cost

- an offer to sell you two things of the same type for the price of one

- an offer to buy an item and receive a second item free, with the requirement that the second item be of equal or lesser value

Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Collins English Dictionary

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WORD ORIGIN

BOGOF is an acronym formed from the initial letters of the advertising slogan "Buy one get one free". It is pronounced /ˈbɒɡɒf/, rhyming with bog off in British English, which makes it accidentally funny. The insult sense of "Bog off!" — meaning go away or leave me alone, slightly childish and a little old-fashioned — is the mnemonic most native speakers hear.

The promotional concept is far older than the abbreviation. It is widely credited to the 18th-century Staffordshire potter and marketing pioneer Josiah Wedgwood, who grasped that a "free" second item pulls harder on the mind than a plain discount.

The word itself is a creature of the 1980s. The Oxford English Dictionary records its earliest known use in 1985 in the American trade magazine Progressive Grocer. In America the shorter form BOGO won out; Britain kept the F, for free, because the promise of free is the whole point.

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THE MAGIC OF FREE

You know the feeling. We pop into the supermarket for milk and leave with twice as much as we planned. That's BOGOF ("Buy One, Get One Free") doing exactly what it is meant to do.

Here's the strange part. One shop offers two jars of coffee for the price of one. Another simply gives 50% off. The price is exactly the same, yet most people prefer the BOGOF. Why?

Because free feels different from cheap.

If something is half price, we still have to decide whether it's worth buying. But if it's free, our brain treats it like a gift. We stop thinking about the maths and focus on what we're getting.

Psychologists call this the zero-price effect. In a famous experiment, people preferred an expensive chocolate when both chocolates cost money. But when the cheaper one became free—even though the prices changed by only one penny—most people switched to the free chocolate. The numbers hardly changed, but people's behaviour did.

That's why BOGOF promotions work so well. The "free" item feels like a bonus, even though we've already paid enough for the shop to make a profit. It feels as though you've won something.

The downside is that we often buy more than we need. The second lettuce wilts. The extra loaf goes stale. Food waste studies have found that offers like BOGOF encourage people to take home more than they can use.

The same idea appears outside supermarkets. We accept extra features, extra meetings and extra reports simply because they're "free". But they still cost time, space or attention.

So next time you see a BOGOF offer, ask yourself one simple question:

Would I buy the second one if it wasn't free?

If the answer is no, then the bargain may not be much of a bargain after all.

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

BOGOF, 2-for-1, BOGO, buy-one-get-one-free, multi-buy offer, twofer, two-for-one, two-for-the-price-of-one

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SMUGGLE OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

"I only went in for milk, but there was a BOGOF on the coffee, so of course I came home with two."

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