For all the messages from Salesforce about environmental stewardship, which resulted in their decision to ban free loot, including the famous dreamforce backpack — there’s still a real glut of company merchandise at Dreamforce, the technology Conference taking control of the center San Francisco this week.
On Wednesday, the second day of the mega-conference-slash-music festival-slash-corporate summer camp, he was tired of stimulus overload and waiting in line. So I embarked on a little game: Could I dress myself, head to toe, in free Dreamforce swag?
An obvious piece of wisdom: corporate conferences and networking events are incredible sources of swag that you’ll use once and then leave in the profane corners of your closet. To make up for the high price and brain drain of having to shake hands and mingle with dozens of strangers a day, you get the promise of a free gift. It is a Pavlovian mode of interaction: shake hands, get a prize.
Nowhere is this more evident than at Dreamforce, where the entire ground floor of the Moscone Center (or in Salesforce parlance, the campground) is brimming with free shit.
Among the prizes at your disposal, beyond the usual bags and bottles of water: caricatures, milk frothers and endless photo sessions. I received a bottle of face wash just for being in the audience for a L’Oreal sponsored game show. There are also the many, many lotteries. Among those I saw on Wednesday: AirPods and AirPod Maxes, Nike Jordans, a guitar signed by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, drones, a Segway, and a Theragun massager. (Some cars were on display, but it wasn’t clear if they were up for grabs.)
So I figured it shouldn’t be too hard to be decked out in company logos from head to toe.
Some ground rules for this little experiment: no duplicates (I don’t need 10 t-shirts from various startups) and no bags (like a blue check, I already have too many).
It went extraordinarily well. First. Upon entering the camp, the TikTok booth was giving out free baseball caps. I shook a hand and took my blue hat. Then, while adventuring, I met a nice man from a company called Coveo: he complimented my pants, we joked around, and he gave me two pairs of striped socks. So far so good.
I got a little greedy. Some people at a booth were buying hoodies. I wanted a hoodie, so that’s where I went. A nice man, telling me about a company called LeanData, burst my bubble, telling me that the hoodies were exclusively for customers. (He assured me that he couldn’t get one either, not even as an employee.) My consolation prize: a green shirt.
That was in the span of 20 minutes. Then the challenges began to arise. In a sea of free T-shirts, bags and cups of coffee, there were no pants. No company would spend thousands of dollars on bottoms, be it nylon shorts or sweatpants. Even Salesforce, in its Dreamforce-branded “Dreamstore,” didn’t sell pants or shorts.
Even Dreamstore, which sells Salesforce onesies and stuffed animals, had no pants.
Joshua Bote/SFGATEAs for shoes, at least two companies were offering sneakers in a raffle. I signed up for one of them, courtesy of Five9. (At the time of writing, I did not win.)
Beyond the challenge of dressing my lower half, there was another, more ethical downside: I got tired of going online under the guise of getting merch. How people can smile and network for three days straight when I could barely do it for an hour is beyond me. I felt a little bad for all the vendors, pitching their releases to someone who was only interested in the deal they had to offer. It must be exhausting to always be connected, rubbing hands with handshakes. There is also the greater discomfort of an event like this: no amount of loot can fill the existential void of sitting through sessions on how to optimize the use of corporate software.
A TikTok hat, a LeanData t-shirt, and Coveo socks were all I could muster.
Joshua Bote/SFGATEMy merch scammer days are, for now, over. But if someone has a pair of pants to give me, I’ll shake hands (very, incredibly reluctantly) and listen to his company pitch.
