A new Slop University marketing poster advertises a survey of unanswered marketplace enquiries, and reports that the University's surplus store will not release an item until the seventh ask.
A survey of neighbourhood-marketplace listings found the ones that moved had already been asked seven times, and the University has taken that distribution as a release rule.
The School of Continuous Improvement has been asking, of every register it meets, which events never become a decision. A neighbourhood-marketplace listing is one such register.
A new Slop University marketing poster, developed with the School, advertises a survey of sellers on local giveaway and second-hand listing groups: how many “is this still available” messages a listing collects before anyone actually turns up, and what happens to the listings that are asked and never collected. The distributions are the finding. The modal listing that moved had already been asked seven times.
An enquiry that never becomes a collection is still an event. We have started counting it as one.
— Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, School of Continuous Improvement
On the strength of that distribution, the University’s own surplus-furniture store will not release an item to the first person who asks. The listing stays marked available until seven enquiries have been logged, and the first buyer is told to wait. The campaign line, Asked, Not Taken, is the rule in four words.
The poster points readers to Fastest Claimed, First Flagged, Dr Adeyemi’s earlier paper on neighbourhood giveaway listings, and is the School’s latest account of how a survey, once published, becomes a practice the University is prepared to keep.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.46y64w.