It isn't easy to buy happiness with just one purchase: Try air safety, national security, & energy savings, too!

In business it's called a tying purchase.

It's a term that grows out of an appreciation for how consumers behave in the marketplace:  something called a "tying" purchase. This refers to the need to buy something else as a result of another purchase or consumption decision a person makes.  For example, if I buy a swimming pool, there eventually comes the need to buy lounge chairs and the supplies that go with having a pool; when a person buys a new outfit--take my wife for instance--she's got an immediate need for new shoes to go with it...because none of the pairs back in the closet do the job!  If I were to buy a boat, I'd have an immediate need to buy skiis, life-jackets, tow-ropes, and so on--you get the picture:  Just when you think you've solved one consumption "problem," you find you have another one!

Getting something for "free" going to be far from free!

That can happen on a larger scale as well and has recently come into the discussion in the media on a most unusual matter.  It seems that wind power turbines are causing a big problem on our way to solving the energy independence problem in the U.S.  As it turns out, moving wind turbine blades look very much like a 747 on a landing approach on military and FAA radar monitors!  Even worse, a "grove" of wind turbines can appear to radar-watchers very much like a thunderstorm from their position 400 feet high in the air!  

Impairing the effectiveness of long-range surveillance radar by wind turbines has now brought the advocates energy independence, national security and air-safety into a clash and each is now considering what's needed next--yes, a tying purchase--to solve the problem.  The military and air-safety people say they need new technology in the form of a new radar system, parts of which today are still pretty much what existed in the 1950s; at a minimum, they say, is the call for new software to run the existing technology.  

It's hard to be happy with just one acquisition!  

So it seems that rarely can you plan on something new ever fully solving the problem.  Wind-turbine farms are, apparently, not the low-cost way to get what we thought was "free" after all.  Instead, just when you solve one consumption problem, there's usually a tying purchase to be made, something that triggers the need to get something else, say, my wife's shoes on the one hand, or a new radar system on the other.  One you can buy at the mall, the other, well, will take a little longer--and a lot more money!  Believe me, either way, marketers have a deep, abiding affection for the term, tying purchase--to them it's a beautiful concept, to the rest of us, well, not so much so.  

[Note:  For those who are interested, I'll post several articles that describe this energy independence versus the national security advocates on the Facebook page shown below.]
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