Hollywood - and maybe even Capitol Hill -must have left a few Europeans confused as to how business is done in the U.S. Let this be their wake-up call: not all North Americans conduct their trade in dark alleys or accept bribes.
And yet Kornelia Gramatte, the public relations spokesperson for ZeitControl, a firm based in Minden, Germany that specializes in smart cards, evidently thinks we Yankees accept cash incentives for just about anything.
In a press release dated Jan. 17, Gramatte's company requested its CombiBasicCard be included in future issues of PR News' sister publication Electronic Commerce News. As an added bonus (or bribe, depending on how you look at it) the last line of the release states, "If there are any cost of the publishing please inform us."
The statement to most journalists is an offer that can certainly be refused.