Operation: Santa's Got a Brand New Bag

Satrical poster making fun of the promotional campaign.

Operation Santa's Got a Brand New Bag, also called The Great Christmas Bribe and SGBNB, was a sales promotion by Economic Borders Unlimited to entice non-Members into signing up for Membership. Between the dates of December 9th, 2010, and December 31st, 2010, EBUL awarded any first-time signup with a whopping twelve thousand coins.

This scheme has been widely criticized by pro and anti-EBUL supporters across the board, not only for being such a desperate attempt, but also for having a potential of being easily abused and laying a hefty burden upon Antarctican tax payers, who will now have to further re-imburse EBUL's rapidly-increasing losses.

Overview

Christmas had historically been a time when new Members arrived and old ones renewed for another year, month, or bi-annual contract. However, and as it had since 2009, penguins have been less eager to opt into EBUL, and even old Members had begun to stop renewing. EBUL has long attempted to reverse this trend, particularly with the infamous assimilation of many products and services starting early in 2010, and the controversial DISNEY Act in mid-2009.

SGBNB was the latest of these attempts to bring EBUL back from the brink of overwhelming debt.

It was proposed by Machu- a penguin hatched into wealth that never needed to worry about budgets (and is not an economist in the company) -and pushed along by special interests to the point that EBUL executives had to vote on it. In a surprising move, the company chose to approve the campaign by one vote: Machu's.

Results

EBUL hasn't published the official result based on new members of Operation: Santa's Got a Brand New Bag. USECP did lose some of their subscribers as well but they didn't comment. Social scientists and journalists estimate that the membership size increased by a third and this has been widely accepted. Other estimations range from a tiny 5% increase to a massive 70% increase.

Economically, the results weren't great. VAT was increased by 5% on all EBUL items and tariffs were also increased by a massive 7% in order to make up for the losses. For the first time, Club Penguin made a lost, which almost shut it down overnight, until a call from the Minister of Economics by Barrick Abanana to an Executive director forced the government to pay an 22.2 billion F to bail out EBUL's scheme. The effects of this came on the taxpayer once again, with Barrick, to force the VAT down in CP, forcing a VAT for the rest of Antarctica, which is around 4.5%. Back in Club Penguin, VAT went down to 2% for EBUL items and 3.5% for other tariffs. This move was unpopular, however it could had been more disastrous; if EBUL shut down, so would Club Penguin and SABER, causing a large scale depression

Three non executive directors, four high-ranking economical development officers and one executive director, resigned from their posts to vacancies in Polaris.