Quick! Answer in the next 10 minutes!
 

Yeah, stupid title, sorry.

On some commercials (not infomercials, just commercials), I see at the end variations of "order in the next 10 minutes, and you'll recieve _____ free!"

My question is, is this just a trick to make you react faster taking away your time to think, or are/can they actually tell when the commercial is on and 10 minutes is up?

I think it is an attempt to deny you time to think rationally about the decision. It is way too easy for me to buy something completely useless if i don't think about it. The more i think about it the less likely i am to spend money.

In most cases, it's a trick. I myself ordered the Oreck air cleaner. I watched the commercial and I had been meaning to look into getting something to keep the air a little cleaner (maybe I have too much time on my hands). The offer on the commercial stated thyat if I orederd in the next 20 minutes, I would recieve a freezer air cleaner AND a free vacum cleaner (a value of over blah blah blah). I did some reasearch about hepa and a ton of other stuff about air cleaners, and decided that it was a decent mechine. I went to the website to order it and, to my surprise, the offer was still good. As an experiment, I went back to the website an hour later. Still good. While I don't know if this is true for all products, it was at least true of this one. It would be a big hastle to keep track of all the commercials in the country and when they air. Filtherton is right.

I had a friend that worked at one the call centers for those things, and they don't have a way to tell how long it's been in relation to where you are calling from, since they get calls from all over, and the shows are all running at different times.