Shopping center will hold prize giveaway on Facebook

The nearly yearlong 65th anniversary of Market City Shopping Center moves to Facebook on Monday as it launches an eight-week-long prize giveaway.

The center is offering gift certificates redeemable at any of the center’s tenants; there will be $25 gift certificates to Foodland Super Market, Formaggio Wine Bar and Torito’s Mexican Food, for example, as well as a Hello Kitty mobile phone case from Upnext Wireless and coupons for services at Hair Images, among others.

Shopping center Vice President Tim Fong said the family feels "blessed to have been serving the East Hono­lulu community for 65 years," and it wants to "share the appeal" of the tenant mix to new customers through the Facebook promotion.

The center and its 25 tenants all are chipping in goodies for the giveaway, valued at a total of $1,125, that will make winners of 65 Facebook users.

If you take a look at the composite prize picture, you will see a milk bottle bearing the Market City logo. It will be a bonus prize.

"If they win a gift certificate to Gina’s B-B-Q, they’ll get a milk bottle, too," Fong said.

No, the center-founding Fong family did not run a dairy.

It did, however, capitalize on the milk-cap craze of the late 1980s with a charity fundraising event. It printed up a bunch of milk caps, also called pogs, and had its logo emblazoned on milk bottles; "when that day came," pog-crazy kids and grown-ups were lined up "past Fun Factory, all the way down the block," said Vice President Sandy Fong.

That day, the first 500 people to pay the entrance fee to play games at the event received a milk bottle with the pog in it.

The pogs are now long gone, but lo and behold, the family still had some of the now-vintage milk bottles, she said.

People can start entering the online contest Monday. To enter, one needs a Facebook account and must "like" the Market City page. Entrants then submit their contact information to be eligible to win one of eight prizes a week for the first seven weeks, or one of nine prizes the final week.

The first winner will be announced Aug. 2, with additional winner announcements each Friday through Sept. 20.

The center will use a program to randomly choose the winners "so we can’t even see the names" until after they are selected, she said.

Hawaii rocks its Honest Tea

Hawaii and Alabama are the most honest states in the union, according to a publicity stunt by the Honest Tea beverage company.

Honest Tea set up un-staffed kiosks of its beverages, offered for $1 on the honor system, in 61 locations from July 8 to 18.

Only two states emerged from the test with a 100 percent honesty score: the Aloha State and Ala­bama, which is known as the Heart of Dixie, the Yellowhammer State and the Cotton State but which, according to the all-knowing Internet, has no official nickname.

Indiana and Maine tied for second place with a score of 99 percent, while Iowa, Nevada, Okla­homa and Tennessee all tied for third place, with a 98 percent score.

It should be mentioned that no data were presented for Arizona, Louisiana or Mississippi, as the company said it didn’t have a large enough sample size to compile an accurate rating.

As with other state rankings, the District of Columbia also gets measured, and this time around it came in dead last with an 80 percent honesty rating.

In 2010’s test, Hono­lulu and Washington, D.C., tied with a 93 percent honesty ranking, slightly below Boston’s 93.3 percent.

That year, Los Angeles was the worst-ranked at 75 percent honesty, meaning one-fourth of the people who picked up an Honest Tea beverage walked away without paying. This year’s ranking compared states instead of cities, and California as a whole was among eight states that scored a 96 percent honesty grade.

———

On the Net:

» thenationalhonesty­index.com

———
Reach Erika Engle at 529-4303, erika@staradvertiser.com or on Twitter as @erikaengle.