This has also crossed my mind, but another really useless item is the radio station bumper sticker. Personally, at this point in my life I don’t want to stick anything on my car–it ruins the look and it’s just incongruous. I find most bumper stickers pointless, but the most pointless of all has to be the radio station bumper sticker. It’s advertisement for the station and it’s free! What business wouldn’t want it’s ad plastered on a vehicle that will be seen by so many? I find the concept (from the car owner’s point of view) annoying. The business (or station) should be paying the driver for the privilege of the ad. Do you think race car drivers happen to put a big Tide sticker on the hood of their car because they like the product? Of course not.
In the case of the radion station sticker, however, what bugs me is WHY people put them on their cars. I think there are two reasons. First, prizes. The drivers think that by putting the sticker on their car a “prize patrol” will spot them, pull them over and award them whatever prize the station is giving away. Not only are the chances slim that they’ll win, but I know from personal experience that these patrols tend to give the prizes to good looking women. So you, John Q. Public, are doing little more than slapping a free ad for a radio station on the bumper of your 86 Civic for nothing.
Second, some people feel that by placing a sticker on their car that they identify themselves to the public as a fan of a particular station or style of music. Yes, I put a KMET bumper sticker on my car back in the early 80s (upside down, as was the custom–what was that about, anyway?). I guess I wanted to let everyone know I was a fan of classic rock (not classic back then) and that I was part of that big group of people who shared my musical tastes. I wouldn’t do it now and quite frankly, I probably don’t want to be part of that amorphous group with which I don’t think I share much outside of the music.
Radio station bumper stickers. Pretty useless.
