While shooting a few weeks ago around lovely Gwynn’s Island (home of Scott Witthaus and his lovely wife, Pam), I happened to mention a gimme cap. He turned and looked at me quizzically and asked, “What is a gimme cap.”
“You know, a hat, a cap with a bill. They’re called gimme caps down South because companies like John Deer, for instance, give them away. Or rather, they used to. It’s a freebie cap with the company’s logo on it. Big River gives away gimme caps.”
Scott, an editor and VCU Brand Center professor, laughed and said, “I have never heard such a thing. It’s not like a sail cat is it?”
NOTE: I wrote a blog last year about the Southern sail cats. He reminded me of it during this conversation. A quick refresher: A sail cat is a dead cat on the highway that has been run over and flattened and dried in the Southern sun into a flat and sailable thing. When I was a child, we’d find sail cats (which was often in the country in Alabama in the 1960’s), and carefully peel them off the pavement and sail them like Frisbees. Works with sail opossums and sail raccoons too. Not so much squirrels or dogs. One is too small, one is too big. Sick, I know, but it didn’t bother the cat.
Anyway, back to gimme caps.
I have about 50 of these things with logos stitched on the front. Piled in the closet. My wife looks at them like garbage every time she goes in there. You probably have several.
Companies mostly sell them today, but some still give them away. When a company like Budweiser gives you a billed cap with their logo on the front, it’s a gimme cap. If they sell it to you, I have no idea what it’s called. Capitalism cap, maybe?
Personally, I feel it is corporately wrong and a damnable sin to sell a gimme cap. Taking money for a gimme cap bastardizes the very reason for the cap’s existence. It hurts the sacred culture of gimme.
Gimme has a culture, too. Companies used to give stuff away. Of course, that stuff had logos. What do you expect? Caps, pens, pencils, rulers, jackets, T-shirts, cups, all kinds of useful items. Our high school had a gimme scoreboard, donated by Coca-Cola. Big logos on each side. That’s a gimme.
They are giving you a product to wear or use with their company logo, making you, for all intents and purposes, an ad for their product. That product should be free. Hence, the gimme cap.
I’ll be damned and go to the DMV for 9 hours if I’ll wear your corporate junk for free. You should not be selling garments with your logo on them. It is corporately wrong. It is breaking the gimme rule. It is whoring the gimme culture. If you want to have walking billboards for your company (other than your employees), give those humans your billboard to wear. Give means free. The customer gets a garment, the company gets a advertisement. Fair trade. It’s an arrangement, a sacred trust – a gimme.
Forgive my belligerent rant, but when I see someone wearing a sweatshirt or T-shirt or cap with some company’s name on the front, I always ask, “Did they give you that to wear or did you buy it?”
I am ashamed at the response these days. I’d estimate 70% bought it. What the heck?
This used to be a gentleman’s (and gentlewoman’s) agreement, a contract. When you wore a brand logo, it meant that you and that brand had a thing going on like “me and Mrs. Jones” in the old soul song.
I see a bunch of kids wearing logos for free and I say, “WTF?” That being, ‘what the finance?” Read some trade agreement economics on Wikipedia, for god’s sake. Look at a NASCAR? You think those logos are on those cars because the drivers love those products? Wake up.
Gimme means just that. Let’s keep gimme caps free. Otherwise, they’re a paid-for cap and then you are just selling out to the man.
